Article 1, Section 8: The Congress shall have Power... To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy;
The two-year limitation applies only to the Army and not to any other military branch or to any civilian agency.
I consider my self a pioneer in the use of computers but also modern. My experience covers the range from plug boards and punched cards to client-server networks and remote operation of PCs.
I do not participate in any social network. I have little interest in "friending" someone I never met face-to-face. I do not tweet. Now retired, I have no real use for LinkedIn. See my http://www.rossde.com/internet/surf.html#missing.
Voting by the general using public is no longer required. The Big8 Management Board makes the decision, Go to http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Main_Page and read the links under "Core Information about the Newsgroup Creation Process".
The benefit of a Big8 (comp.*, news.*, sci.*, humanities.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, and misc.*) newsgroup or even an alt.* newsgroup outside of the Big8 is that you are not tied to any one specific service or to any one specific application on your computer. (If you choose the Big8, your newsgroup would likely fall in the talk.* category.)
In case someone reading the article is too young to recognize the term, a "valve" is an electron tube, one of those things that would sometimes have to be replaced in the back of a radio or TV set. Yes, they got quite hot and any large array of them required special cooling. Even a radio or TV set could warm a room.
The NTP Internet client on my PC synchronizes my clock every hour, a setting that I can change to minute increments. I can also manually cause it to synchronize my clock at any time.
It alerts me to pending leap-seconds. Since it synchronizes in UTC, however, that alert is for information only. If a leap-second causes a failure to synchronize, I get a different alert and can manually request synchronization again. If a leap-second causes an inappropriate synchronization, that will be corrected an hour later (or sooner if I recognize it and manually request another synchronization).
Effectively, a hospital or other institution should have only one operating NTP Internet client that is used to synchronize a local NTP server to external servers. Then the institution's LAN should provide clients that synchronize to that local server. Not only would this ensure consistency, but it would also prevent flooding external NTP servers. Such a setup -- a network with a single internal NTP server without each platform doing its own external NTP synchronization -- is strongly recommended at http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/RulesOfEngagement.
For a hospital, it is indeed necessary to have not only consistent clocks but also accurate clocks. Otherwise records from outside ambulance services cannot be correlated with records from inside emergency rooms.
Six months ago, I logged from where visitors to some of my Web pages came. I was particularly interested in which search services were crawling my Web site. I am now completing a similar logging.
Six months ago, Bing had completely replaced MSN as a crawler; MSN did not crawl my selected Web pages even once. This time, I am again seeing MSN crawling my Web site.
Does this mean that Micro$oft is reverting back to its prior search service and abandoning Bing?
I must agree with those who suggest "pen and paper", although I use my computer to compose and print my letters. I try to limit my letters to a single page. Sometimes, I even use a postcard. The shorter the content, the more likely it will be read completely.
For members of Congress -- both senators and representatives -- letters should generally be sent to their home-state offices and not to their offices in Washington. Since 9/11, letters sent to Congressional offices in Washington are delayed as much as two weeks while they are examined for harmful substances.
When I receive a form-letter reply or a reply that fails to really address the issue I am trying to raise, I copy the reply and write my own response on the copy. My response includes the fact that my elected official did not really address my issue and that I will remember that lack at the next election. Sometimes, I even place a copy of the non-responsive reply on my Web site with my commentary, which is never positive.
The women's magazine "Redbook" was published long before Zuckerberg was born. It is now available online. Many businesses and government agencies -- including my local schools -- public handbooks. The trademark on "book" as incorporated into a word with some other leading phrase is invalid because of prior use by others.
You have contact information about the company. Until the interview, however, you have never met the person who interviews you. If you already knew the interviewer, you would have contacted him or her without going through the formality of applying for the job.
Unless you really think you can get a job doing research about computers, avoid getting a computer science degree.
When I managed a team of software testers, I wanted to hire someone who understood how to use a computer as a tool. I did not want someone to whom a computer was the focus of interest. Thus, I hired individuals with degrees in mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, meteorology, and astronomy but generally rejected applications from individuals with degrees in computer science. I even hired someone with a degree in English because she had used computers to analyze texts.
If you have used computers in your studies, that needs to be emphasized when you apply for a job. Give specific examples, not generalities. For example, did you use a computer to do statistical analyses on psychological experiments? If so, did you do your own programming (good), or did you use an existing statistics package (not so good). Did you create a computer model of a psychological experiment (very, very good)?
One important use for business cards is during job interviews. The candidate should always ask the interviewer for his or her card rather than spend time writing down contact information or using a smart phone. (While the interviewer might have to take a phone call that interrupts the interview, it is very counter-productive for the candidate to use a phone then.) After the interview, the candidate can then send a "thank you" to the interviewer, either E-mail or postal mail. No matter how negative the interview might have seemed, the message should be positive (unless you are truly positive you would NEVER work for that person no matter where he or she might be in the future). In this case, the business card also helps to build a history of your job-search activity, which might be important if you are collecting unemployment benefits.
Very much similar to a business card is a calling card. The difference is that a calling card does not indicate any employment. Yes, the concept is very 19th century but still useful in the 21st century. I use a calling card when shopping if a special order has to be placed. It provides a sales clerk with my contact information so they do not record my name as Roth or Roff instead of Ross; often, the clerk will merely staple my calling card to the order form instead of writing the contact information. As a docent at a public garden, I sometimes give visitors my calling card if they express an interest in contacting me about certain plants or gardening techniques; it has my E-mail address and my Web site's URI (17 Web pages of garden information, not counting my garden diary).
I was a software test engineer for over 30 years. There is no such thing as a computer system that is completely error-free. While SOME drivers are impaired or simply have poor judgement, other drivers are alert, coordinated, and generally safe. On the other hand, all autonomous cars from the same manufacturer will have the same software errors.
The current leader in developing autonomous cars is Google. I would not drive one of Google's cars unless I knew that Google was not tracking where I went and what route I took to get there. I am concerned that, even if the car does not transmit its location and route in real-time, a mechanic might still be able to download the car's history while servicing the car. That information should be available only to law-enforcement agencies and even then only when a judge issues a warrant after being convinced there is probable cause that the history is relevant to an actual crime.
Today's (20 Feb) edition -- print and online -- of the Los Angeles Times contains an unsigned editorial (thus, the official opinion of the newspaper itself) condemning the Heartland Institute. The editorial notes that, even if the document whose authenticity is being disputed is a forgery, other Heartland documents that are authentic also discuss the planting of school curricula that deny the existence of global climate change caused by human activities.
Bloat would merely mean an inconvenience, possibly the need to install a larger and faster hard-drive. However, my favorite independent computer shop informed me that Norton Anti-Virus was the cause of overall performance degrading on my Windows XP along with too-frequent "blue screens of death".
The computer shop advised me to obtain the freeware versions of AVG Anti-Virus and Malwarebytes. They install both on all new PCs they sell. They assert that no one anti-virus package can detect all threats.
The freeware version of AVG Anti-Virus runs continuously and automatically in the background and updates daily. The freeware version of Malwarebytes requires manual launching for each scan; you need the purchase-ware version for automation.
Early in October, I logged hits to some of the pages on my own Web site to analyze which browsers and search crawlers are in use. Of the 301 hits by IE, 13.6% were by IE 6, 14.6% were by IE7, 49.2% were by IE8, and 22.6% were by IE9.
However, my chosen browser is SeaMonkey, now at 2.6.1. Almost no one seems to use SeaMonkey, which accounted for only 3 hits.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power 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; "
I believe in the benefits of copyrights. Most of my Web pages are copyrighted. However, the current state of intellectual law is unacceptable. Extending copyright coverage to 90 years (Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) violates the concept of "limited Times". The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) stifles innovation instead of promoting it. And the primary beneficiaries of these laws are not "Authors and Inventors" but corporate publishers, movie studios, and record companies who reap the bounty of others' creativity. If you agree that this situation is intolerable, tell your representatives and senators in Congress.
I copied the above paragraph from one of my own copyrighted Web pages (with a slight modification in the second sentence). I hereby grant to the public the right to quote that paragraph at will, in all contexts, and in all media.
It has been known for many years that two OpenPGP keys might have the same key ID. After all, a 36-bit hash of a 1024-bit or 4096-bit key cannot be unique.
However, no key fingerprint collision is yet known when the key-type and key-length are both the same. That is why, when verifying the ownership of a key, the owner is supposed to supply the type (RSA vs DH/DSS), the key-length (not the key ID length), and the key fingerprint (128 bits for RSA and 160 bits for DH/DSS).
In Laroia's case, neither the key-types nor the key-lengths were the same for the two keys that had the same key ID.
Note: I indicate "no key fingerprint collision is yet known". Such a collision is mathematically possible, but it is extremely difficult (not impossible) to contrive.
My daughter has a master's degree in education. Her master's project studied distance learning for adults over the Internet. She found that Web-based courses can indeed be effective. HOWEVER, she also found that such courses are far more effective if the students and instructor meet face-to-face as a group about once each month.
Distance learning can be very important for adults. For example, in some areas, doctors are required to pursue ongoing education in order to retain their licenses. For a doctor in a rural area where he or she is the only health provider, leaving the community to take a two-week course would mean that the community is left without any doctor.
An E-mail message encrypted via OpenPGP remains encrypted on the sender's computer (replacing the clear-text version), on the outgoing server (if retained), on the receiving server (if retained), and on the recipient's computer.
Yes, the sender or the recipient can decrypt it and save the clear-text version. However, that is considered a bad practice that is discouraged.
If Mac OS X's Mail client automatically supports PGP, it is not necessary to obtain any certificate from an outside source. With an OpenPGP application installed on your own computer -- Mac, PC, UNIX, Linux, etc -- you generate your own certificate. See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP/index.html.
A high turnover of employees creates problems with in-house development and maintenance of software. The "organizational memory" -- how did we get here, what were the problems, how were they solved -- is lost.
In the U.S. military, cognizant personnel are often rotated to new assignments every 2-3 years. This has the same negative effect on long-term maintenance and evolution of software for military uses. For this reason, military software projects are (or at least were) out-sourced.
For 24 years, I worked for the System Development Corporation (SDC), which eventually became part of Burroughs which then merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys. We worked with the Aerospace Corporation and with Lockheed. Together, these three companies held the organizational memory needed to maintain computer systems for operating an ever-changing array of earth-orbiting space satellites. Our role at SDC-Burroughs-Unisys was to receive software packages from 10 or more independent software development companies (sometimes the same companies that built the satellites) and integrate them into a single system. We audited the developers' specifications and tests, tested the merged packages, performed configuration management, prepared user documents, conducted training for the end-users, and diagnosed suspected errors. On occasion, we even rejected software and sent it back to the developer company to rework. Contrary to current practices, the most senior professionals also provided "help desk" support. In all the time I worked on this project, not one space satellite was lost due to a software error. Considering the cost of a space satellite, the fact that our task doubled the overall cost of software development was money wisely spent.
While the project on which I worked was technically out-sourced from the U.S. Air Force, the repeated renewal of our contract and the contracts of Aerospace and Lockheed created an in-house professionally-skilled environment for acquiring and evaluating software. As a result, a very large software system with an expected life-span of 15 years evolved and was used for over 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Article 1, Section 8: ...
The Congress shall have Power
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
The two-year limitation applies only to the Army and not to any other military branch or to any civilian agency.
I consider my self a pioneer in the use of computers but also modern. My experience covers the range from plug boards and punched cards to client-server networks and remote operation of PCs.
I do not participate in any social network. I have little interest in "friending" someone I never met face-to-face. I do not tweet. Now retired, I have no real use for LinkedIn. See my http://www.rossde.com/internet/surf.html#missing.
Voting by the general using public is no longer required. The Big8 Management Board makes the decision, Go to http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Main_Page and read the links under "Core Information about the Newsgroup Creation Process".
The benefit of a Big8 (comp.*, news.*, sci.*, humanities.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, and misc.*) newsgroup or even an alt.* newsgroup outside of the Big8 is that you are not tied to any one specific service or to any one specific application on your computer. (If you choose the Big8, your newsgroup would likely fall in the talk.* category.)
In case someone reading the article is too young to recognize the term, a "valve" is an electron tube, one of those things that would sometimes have to be replaced in the back of a radio or TV set. Yes, they got quite hot and any large array of them required special cooling. Even a radio or TV set could warm a room.
The cited Web page (at Keep the Web Open) has 39 XHTML errors and 71 CSS errors. I cannot read the comments or any details about Issa's 10 points.
The NTP Internet client on my PC synchronizes my clock every hour, a setting that I can change to minute increments. I can also manually cause it to synchronize my clock at any time.
It alerts me to pending leap-seconds. Since it synchronizes in UTC, however, that alert is for information only. If a leap-second causes a failure to synchronize, I get a different alert and can manually request synchronization again. If a leap-second causes an inappropriate synchronization, that will be corrected an hour later (or sooner if I recognize it and manually request another synchronization).
Effectively, a hospital or other institution should have only one operating NTP Internet client that is used to synchronize a local NTP server to external servers. Then the institution's LAN should provide clients that synchronize to that local server. Not only would this ensure consistency, but it would also prevent flooding external NTP servers. Such a setup -- a network with a single internal NTP server without each platform doing its own external NTP synchronization -- is strongly recommended at http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/RulesOfEngagement.
For a hospital, it is indeed necessary to have not only consistent clocks but also accurate clocks. Otherwise records from outside ambulance services cannot be correlated with records from inside emergency rooms.
Six months ago, I logged from where visitors to some of my Web pages came. I was particularly interested in which search services were crawling my Web site. I am now completing a similar logging.
Six months ago, Bing had completely replaced MSN as a crawler; MSN did not crawl my selected Web pages even once. This time, I am again seeing MSN crawling my Web site.
Does this mean that Micro$oft is reverting back to its prior search service and abandoning Bing?
I must agree with those who suggest "pen and paper", although I use my computer to compose and print my letters. I try to limit my letters to a single page. Sometimes, I even use a postcard. The shorter the content, the more likely it will be read completely.
For members of Congress -- both senators and representatives -- letters should generally be sent to their home-state offices and not to their offices in Washington. Since 9/11, letters sent to Congressional offices in Washington are delayed as much as two weeks while they are examined for harmful substances.
When I receive a form-letter reply or a reply that fails to really address the issue I am trying to raise, I copy the reply and write my own response on the copy. My response includes the fact that my elected official did not really address my issue and that I will remember that lack at the next election. Sometimes, I even place a copy of the non-responsive reply on my Web site with my commentary, which is never positive.
The women's magazine "Redbook" was published long before Zuckerberg was born. It is now available online. Many businesses and government agencies -- including my local schools -- public handbooks. The trademark on "book" as incorporated into a word with some other leading phrase is invalid because of prior use by others.
You have contact information about the company. Until the interview, however, you have never met the person who interviews you. If you already knew the interviewer, you would have contacted him or her without going through the formality of applying for the job.
Unless you really think you can get a job doing research about computers, avoid getting a computer science degree.
When I managed a team of software testers, I wanted to hire someone who understood how to use a computer as a tool. I did not want someone to whom a computer was the focus of interest. Thus, I hired individuals with degrees in mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, meteorology, and astronomy but generally rejected applications from individuals with degrees in computer science. I even hired someone with a degree in English because she had used computers to analyze texts.
If you have used computers in your studies, that needs to be emphasized when you apply for a job. Give specific examples, not generalities. For example, did you use a computer to do statistical analyses on psychological experiments? If so, did you do your own programming (good), or did you use an existing statistics package (not so good). Did you create a computer model of a psychological experiment (very, very good)?
One important use for business cards is during job interviews. The candidate should always ask the interviewer for his or her card rather than spend time writing down contact information or using a smart phone. (While the interviewer might have to take a phone call that interrupts the interview, it is very counter-productive for the candidate to use a phone then.) After the interview, the candidate can then send a "thank you" to the interviewer, either E-mail or postal mail. No matter how negative the interview might have seemed, the message should be positive (unless you are truly positive you would NEVER work for that person no matter where he or she might be in the future). In this case, the business card also helps to build a history of your job-search activity, which might be important if you are collecting unemployment benefits.
Very much similar to a business card is a calling card. The difference is that a calling card does not indicate any employment. Yes, the concept is very 19th century but still useful in the 21st century. I use a calling card when shopping if a special order has to be placed. It provides a sales clerk with my contact information so they do not record my name as Roth or Roff instead of Ross; often, the clerk will merely staple my calling card to the order form instead of writing the contact information. As a docent at a public garden, I sometimes give visitors my calling card if they express an interest in contacting me about certain plants or gardening techniques; it has my E-mail address and my Web site's URI (17 Web pages of garden information, not counting my garden diary).
Padilla's bill is SB 1298 at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1298&sess=CUR. It has not yet had its first committee hearing.
I was a software test engineer for over 30 years. There is no such thing as a computer system that is completely error-free. While SOME drivers are impaired or simply have poor judgement, other drivers are alert, coordinated, and generally safe. On the other hand, all autonomous cars from the same manufacturer will have the same software errors.
The current leader in developing autonomous cars is Google. I would not drive one of Google's cars unless I knew that Google was not tracking where I went and what route I took to get there. I am concerned that, even if the car does not transmit its location and route in real-time, a mechanic might still be able to download the car's history while servicing the car. That information should be available only to law-enforcement agencies and even then only when a judge issues a warrant after being convinced there is probable cause that the history is relevant to an actual crime.
Today's (20 Feb) edition -- print and online -- of the Los Angeles Times contains an unsigned editorial (thus, the official opinion of the newspaper itself) condemning the Heartland Institute. The editorial notes that, even if the document whose authenticity is being disputed is a forgery, other Heartland documents that are authentic also discuss the planting of school curricula that deny the existence of global climate change caused by human activities.
See http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-climate-20120220,0,3564279.story.
See http://news.yahoo.com/influence-game-leaks-show-groups-climate-efforts-210616751.html.
The Mozilla organization has released Firefox 10.0 and even 10.0.1, but there is no browser actually named Mozilla that has a version 10.
"Your Browser: Mozilla10" There is no such browser!
Bloat would merely mean an inconvenience, possibly the need to install a larger and faster hard-drive. However, my favorite independent computer shop informed me that Norton Anti-Virus was the cause of overall performance degrading on my Windows XP along with too-frequent "blue screens of death".
The computer shop advised me to obtain the freeware versions of AVG Anti-Virus and Malwarebytes. They install both on all new PCs they sell. They assert that no one anti-virus package can detect all threats.
The freeware version of AVG Anti-Virus runs continuously and automatically in the background and updates daily. The freeware version of Malwarebytes requires manual launching for each scan; you need the purchase-ware version for automation.
Early in October, I logged hits to some of the pages on my own Web site to analyze which browsers and search crawlers are in use. Of the 301 hits by IE, 13.6% were by IE 6, 14.6% were by IE7, 49.2% were by IE8, and 22.6% were by IE9.
However, my chosen browser is SeaMonkey, now at 2.6.1. Almost no one seems to use SeaMonkey, which accounted for only 3 hits.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power 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; "
I believe in the benefits of copyrights. Most of my Web pages are copyrighted. However, the current state of intellectual law is unacceptable. Extending copyright coverage to 90 years (Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) violates the concept of "limited Times". The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) stifles innovation instead of promoting it. And the primary beneficiaries of these laws are not "Authors and Inventors" but corporate publishers, movie studios, and record companies who reap the bounty of others' creativity. If you agree that this situation is intolerable, tell your representatives and senators in Congress.
I copied the above paragraph from one of my own copyrighted Web pages (with a slight modification in the second sentence). I hereby grant to the public the right to quote that paragraph at will, in all contexts, and in all media.
It has been known for many years that two OpenPGP keys might have the same key ID. After all, a 36-bit hash of a 1024-bit or 4096-bit key cannot be unique.
However, no key fingerprint collision is yet known when the key-type and key-length are both the same. That is why, when verifying the ownership of a key, the owner is supposed to supply the type (RSA vs DH/DSS), the key-length (not the key ID length), and the key fingerprint (128 bits for RSA and 160 bits for DH/DSS).
In Laroia's case, neither the key-types nor the key-lengths were the same for the two keys that had the same key ID.
Note: I indicate "no key fingerprint collision is yet known". Such a collision is mathematically possible, but it is extremely difficult (not impossible) to contrive.
My daughter has a master's degree in education. Her master's project studied distance learning for adults over the Internet. She found that Web-based courses can indeed be effective. HOWEVER, she also found that such courses are far more effective if the students and instructor meet face-to-face as a group about once each month.
Distance learning can be very important for adults. For example, in some areas, doctors are required to pursue ongoing education in order to retain their licenses. For a doctor in a rural area where he or she is the only health provider, leaving the community to take a two-week course would mean that the community is left without any doctor.
An E-mail message encrypted via OpenPGP remains encrypted on the sender's computer (replacing the clear-text version), on the outgoing server (if retained), on the receiving server (if retained), and on the recipient's computer.
Yes, the sender or the recipient can decrypt it and save the clear-text version. However, that is considered a bad practice that is discouraged.
If Mac OS X's Mail client automatically supports PGP, it is not necessary to obtain any certificate from an outside source. With an OpenPGP application installed on your own computer -- Mac, PC, UNIX, Linux, etc -- you generate your own certificate. See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP/index.html.
A high turnover of employees creates problems with in-house development and maintenance of software. The "organizational memory" -- how did we get here, what were the problems, how were they solved -- is lost.
In the U.S. military, cognizant personnel are often rotated to new assignments every 2-3 years. This has the same negative effect on long-term maintenance and evolution of software for military uses. For this reason, military software projects are (or at least were) out-sourced.
For 24 years, I worked for the System Development Corporation (SDC), which eventually became part of Burroughs which then merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys. We worked with the Aerospace Corporation and with Lockheed. Together, these three companies held the organizational memory needed to maintain computer systems for operating an ever-changing array of earth-orbiting space satellites. Our role at SDC-Burroughs-Unisys was to receive software packages from 10 or more independent software development companies (sometimes the same companies that built the satellites) and integrate them into a single system. We audited the developers' specifications and tests, tested the merged packages, performed configuration management, prepared user documents, conducted training for the end-users, and diagnosed suspected errors. On occasion, we even rejected software and sent it back to the developer company to rework. Contrary to current practices, the most senior professionals also provided "help desk" support. In all the time I worked on this project, not one space satellite was lost due to a software error. Considering the cost of a space satellite, the fact that our task doubled the overall cost of software development was money wisely spent.
While the project on which I worked was technically out-sourced from the U.S. Air Force, the repeated renewal of our contract and the contracts of Aerospace and Lockheed created an in-house professionally-skilled environment for acquiring and evaluating software. As a result, a very large software system with an expected life-span of 15 years evolved and was used for over 20 years.