Re:The journey of a thousand miles...
on
How to be a Programmer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree with the poster above, but I would like to add a twist. I have found that few successful programs are successful at
simply programming. To be truely successful, you must be good at learning to program.
Agreed, yet...
n the end, your actual training and experience is bunk, unless it used as the basis for learning more. The truely gifted
programmer does not build static project. He or she builds a tome of routines and knowledge that are the foundations for
code used decades later.
I'll differ here. I once felt it was a good idea to build a library of routines. However, the flow and product of the routines is more important than actual code. Better still is the experience of writing the same program a thousand times. The experienced programmer/analyst hears someone describe a need and is already assembling it in their mind. Visualizing the manifestation of the concept is key, writing code is just manual labor. What's the saying? Success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration? Well, the 10% is what they're really paying you for.
...Simple, just keep doing the stuff they give you. When one tool doesn't work, pickup and learn a better tool. I remember taking on a student job as a programmer, back in 1981. The path has twisted and turned a bit, but I'm still doing it until I find something else I really like... or win the lottery;-)
Overall, I've been very happy with the Sony Clie's quality as well as the memory stick, and all my couterparts with a
Clie that I have spoken too would say the same thing.
Thanks for the info. I've had a Sony VAIO 505TX for a few years and had hardly any quality issues with it. (It's currently on the way to Oz with friends who will be borrowing it for the next year) OTOH the operating system has proven to be nothing more than flawless. When it comes back I'll be putting the penguin to work on it.
The thing that holds me back from buying Sony products is their memory stick. If they would use Smart Digital or
Compact Flash I'd get one is a heartbeat.
I've expressed similar sentiment on/. before and got drilled a bit, because Memory Stick has become cost competitive with Smart and Compact. Personally, I use Compact for everything and wouldn't like having to spend the money twice.
I do have some reservations about Sony's quality, as a rising number of reviews are finding problems with Sony's quality. It seems after Akio Morita died the company's focus appears less on innovation and solid quality, more on innovation and maximizing profit drawing on Sony's reputation. I get burned once and I seldom give a second chance. There are so many players in the various tech markets these days.
Has anyone had quality issues with Clié units?
Lastly: This page renders like sh!t in Netscape. How very unprofessional.
Effectively the US outspent the USSR and broke them.
And exactly where do you think the US got the money to do that?
We borrowed it all from the Japanese, Germans, Swiss, and anyone else who sunk money into financing U.S. debt.
The irony is, if Russia actually pulls itself together fairly soon it can again be a superpower. It left the coldwar with only $80 Billion international debt. I don't imagine China has much of a debt, but the U.S., last I looked, was $5+ trillion in the hole and Bush handed us the shovel and said, "get digging, again" It's gotta get paid off, and while the U.S. taxpayer does, other economies can surge ahead.
The free world won the cold war because an open society is more efficient than a closed one.
I'm not sure how you are tying that to selection of software. Effectively the US outspent the USSR and broke them. At the present rate of growth in China, which is in some ways open, some ways closed, it will be interesting to see how the US stacks up in the years to come. Seems to me the biggest economy wags the tail.
It is ironic the government embracing pricey closed systems, particularly how they are doing it. NSA and Homeland Security employ open source, apparently because they have full access to code and updates. Less critical applications get the junk. I've had to exchange data with various government departments before and typically they're a bit disorganised, so throwing buggy software at them seems like a way to compound their problems. Great for the next round of budget cuts, "Department X is inefficient and unresponsive to the needs of the people and will be eliminated/restructured/etc.", as sacrificial lamb to show leadership, etc.
"Their giving us Microsoft Office and and Exchange Server."
"Yeah, looks like it's time to polish up the old resume."
Well, the posting sure is, it's under Your Rights Online. Undoubtably captainclever and timothy are in cahoots to sneak spam related articles under someone's filter.
What is your impression of Microsoft a) at your convention and b) Microsoft's efforts to lure Unix customers into their fold, away from Linux? Do they appear successful?
It's effectively delivering applications which run from a server (which we used to do back in the dark ages before everyone got a bug up their a55 to have software installed on 1.0e09 computers, we maintained it on the server only, what is old is new again.) The plus for Houston is that this suite of apps runs on a multitude of devices, not just your big hulking desktop PC or watered down interfaces on smaller devices. It does appear to indicate they will invest more in network bandwidth and hardware (HINT: If you are a network guru, apply with the City of Houston before the line gets too long.)
Yeah, it's competition for Microsoft and face it, Microsoft is the monolithic dinosaur with an aging product line. SimDesk, whatever you want to say about them, is the fleet of foot furry little rascal which is prepared for the coming ice age.
Great idea, until someone puts a baseball through your living room Window.
I'm more concerned about longterm UV exposure and heat from sunlight. Have you ever seen one of those windshields that blisters and separates? Uneven backlighting would be a problem, too, assuming any passes through, and you'd need backlighting at night. Soundslike a better idea for placing in a wall between rooms.
Of course, they'd have a heck of a time coming up with a name to market these under... since Windows is already taken.
In the game of statistics, you may not necessarily reside at the center of the bell-curve, but any saavy marketeer could probably work them out to those who do reside there.
This is doomed to failure. Without any of the big name gaming companies to back them up, noone will buy the console.
Hmm. Unless those 32k+ games are really 32767 variations on Tetris and a couple FPS I'd agree. What we really need is a open platform. Even ID started out with the humble beginnings, growing out of shareware. IIRC the GP32 was supposed to encourage outside development, relying on profits from sale of hardware, unlike Sony, Nintendo, Xbox.
There is active discussion on the forums about how some spam got
through the filter, and ways to counter it.
And no doubt there are lurkers who keenly follow the discussions, a la Rambus, to go back and refine their spamming technique. I'm sure the opposing terms are arranged to throw off the statistical model, i.e offset a few.99 words with several.01 words.
In retrospect, I dumped 300+ spams yesterday and the messages are becoming increasingly surreal as they attempt to bypass filtering. It seems a safe bet that anyone filtering spam, themselves, is already wary and a waste of effort to spam. I'm so jaded by it that my email client is set to display email only in text format. No HTML, no plugins, nuthin.
So the solution appears to be a combination of statistics and mechanical (programmed) filters. i.e. strip the commented text then run the remainder past the statistical database.
And Spam will no doubt evlove, it that's the word for it, it's so absurd lately that I suggest 'mutate' as more descriptive.
Too bad the feds don't just stop arguing about free speech rights of direct marketers and instead throw a few million into Superbowl halftime ads ridculing anyone stoopid enough to fall for spam, maybe display a quick URL for people to link to for educational purposes. The damage from such a salvo should nip the problem considerably.
Silhouetted figure:"Hi, my name is Bob. I responded to a Spam at work. I lost my job because the link took me to a pr0n site. I also lost all my money because I replied to one of those 'Resuce your debt' messages. My wife, kids and dog left me and even my neighbours laugh behind my back. I guess Spam isn't at all honest."
I recently assembled a PC (check my journal for various details) and registered, online, a number of the packages and hardware that I assembled it with. I've kept a yahoo.com email address for special purposes, as you suggest (slashdot registration, etc.) and it had remained spam free for years. Now it gets spam. Guess who sells email addresses or has a hole in their boot?
If only I'd given a different address for each I could figue out definitively who the culprit is.
Re:More than 1.1 billion pigs are killed worldwide
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Could Bayesian filtering be applied to filter offtopic posts as well?
Unfortunately, it might work at first, but we've seen offtopic posters and first posters evolve. Alas, they seem to be a form of semi-intelligent life and once their numbers start to dwindle you can almost bet some internet environmentalist society will crop up and declare them endangered "where once, great herds of them swept majestically across the plains, now only a few cling to the ever encroaching egalitarian dark forces of the internet.
It's probably just easier to round them up and send them to Guantanamo.
The irony is, Spam evolves, yet people still fall for spam. If it didn't work, we'd have seen the last of it years ago.
I've downloaded MailWasher and have just started looking through it (so I don't know what it uses for filtering.) I've noticed a lot of the recent junk is html with the ploy spelled among comment tags, i.e.:
<-- Job Offer --> Biggie <-- for web --> your <-- designer --> doohickey
Are any of the filters able to handle these?
Lastly, has anyone ever bother to combat spam with spam? I.e. send out a letter explaining what people are likely to get, aside from their credit card charged out to a pr0n site, sugar pills, photocopies of something you can find in any library, identity theft, etc. ?
If I broke some foreign country's law and then traveled there afterwards, I think I'd be more mad at myself.
Rest assured, if you are an american, you probably break half a dozen islamic laws, as laid down by the supreme council of Iran, before breakfast.
Re:No Offense meant, but..
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You're the type of person who would ask Skylarov why he chose to come to the U.S. to speak at a technology conference.
On the contrary, I applaud Dimitri Sklyarov and feel his work was construct, in the face of unjust legislation the USA exports and tries to exert on other peoples. It should be the choice of each sovereign nation to determine the extent of copyright/patent protection to inventors. One country, such as the USA, may attempt to hold all others in thrall as long as the life of intellectual property protection.
Besides, Kevin didn't attempt to bypass electronic IP safeguards, except as the DMCA may regard hacking. He revealed the swisscheese security of information systems in their infancy. He made people afraid, powerful people. We already, well most of us, are aware what sort of democracy-for-sale the Congress and Administration are, when their friends sneeze, they catch cold, and act within or without the law. It's a matter for the defendant to pry him/herself out of such a mess. As often as such examples play it's remarkable anyone wants to open themselves to such harrassment, particularly without alerting the ACLU or some group ahead of time that they intend to demonstrate how unjust the system is, in whole or part.
Anyone remember the 414's? A group of young men in the Milwaukee area who, when caught breaking into DEC systems wanted to sell movie rights? It wasn't too hard to figure how they did it, hell, I was admin on a DEC system and there were default passwords and field service passwords easy enough to guess. You just had to be bored and stupid enough to go trespassing.
I have plenty of sympathy for those treated unjustly, but those who go alone to spread fear among powerful interests are no more clever than a swimmer dogpaddling around in a shark tank.
No Offense meant, but..
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No offense meant,but
he has a book to sell and a consulting business to build. (Don't forget: Kevin hasn't been able to make much money for a number of years, and has a lot of lost time to make up for.)
Knowing all this as the result of your choice, would you choose this path again? If so, why?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, yet...
n the end, your actual training and experience is bunk, unless it used as the basis for learning more. The truely gifted programmer does not build static project. He or she builds a tome of routines and knowledge that are the foundations for code used decades later.
I'll differ here. I once felt it was a good idea to build a library of routines. However, the flow and product of the routines is more important than actual code. Better still is the experience of writing the same program a thousand times. The experienced programmer/analyst hears someone describe a need and is already assembling it in their mind. Visualizing the manifestation of the concept is key, writing code is just manual labor. What's the saying? Success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration? Well, the 10% is what they're really paying you for.
Such sagely wisdom
With anonymity you write
Knowing and unknown.
...Simple, just keep doing the stuff they give you. When one tool doesn't work, pickup and learn a better tool. I remember taking on a student job as a programmer, back in 1981. The path has twisted and turned a bit, but I'm still doing it until I find something else I really like ... or win the lottery ;-)
Thanks for the info. I've had a Sony VAIO 505TX for a few years and had hardly any quality issues with it. (It's currently on the way to Oz with friends who will be borrowing it for the next year) OTOH the operating system has proven to be nothing more than flawless. When it comes back I'll be putting the penguin to work on it.
Imagine Dirty Harry working in a fast food restaurant...
"You want fries with that?"
I've expressed similar sentiment on /. before and got drilled a bit, because Memory Stick has become cost competitive with Smart and Compact. Personally, I use Compact for everything and wouldn't like having to spend the money twice.
I do have some reservations about Sony's quality, as a rising number of reviews are finding problems with Sony's quality. It seems after Akio Morita died the company's focus appears less on innovation and solid quality, more on innovation and maximizing profit drawing on Sony's reputation. I get burned once and I seldom give a second chance. There are so many players in the various tech markets these days.
Has anyone had quality issues with Clié units?
Lastly: This page renders like sh!t in Netscape. How very unprofessional.
With this trend I foresee the following:
"Repeat after me: With this PDA I thee wed."
"With this PDA I thee wed."
And exactly where do you think the US got the money to do that?
We borrowed it all from the Japanese, Germans, Swiss, and anyone else who sunk money into financing U.S. debt.
The irony is, if Russia actually pulls itself together fairly soon it can again be a superpower. It left the coldwar with only $80 Billion international debt. I don't imagine China has much of a debt, but the U.S., last I looked, was $5+ trillion in the hole and Bush handed us the shovel and said, "get digging, again" It's gotta get paid off, and while the U.S. taxpayer does, other economies can surge ahead.
I'm not sure how you are tying that to selection of software. Effectively the US outspent the USSR and broke them. At the present rate of growth in China, which is in some ways open, some ways closed, it will be interesting to see how the US stacks up in the years to come. Seems to me the biggest economy wags the tail.
It is ironic the government embracing pricey closed systems, particularly how they are doing it. NSA and Homeland Security employ open source, apparently because they have full access to code and updates. Less critical applications get the junk. I've had to exchange data with various government departments before and typically they're a bit disorganised, so throwing buggy software at them seems like a way to compound their problems. Great for the next round of budget cuts, "Department X is inefficient and unresponsive to the needs of the people and will be eliminated/restructured/etc.", as sacrificial lamb to show leadership, etc.
"Their giving us Microsoft Office and and Exchange Server."
"Yeah, looks like it's time to polish up the old resume."
404 Page not found.
Well, the posting sure is, it's under Your Rights Online. Undoubtably captainclever and timothy are in cahoots to sneak spam related articles under someone's filter.
What is your impression of Microsoft a) at your convention and b) Microsoft's efforts to lure Unix customers into their fold, away from Linux? Do they appear successful?
Yeah, it's competition for Microsoft and face it, Microsoft is the monolithic dinosaur with an aging product line. SimDesk, whatever you want to say about them, is the fleet of foot furry little rascal which is prepared for the coming ice age.
Geez, and we're after a Saddam for being a monster.
I'm more concerned about longterm UV exposure and heat from sunlight. Have you ever seen one of those windshields that blisters and separates? Uneven backlighting would be a problem, too, assuming any passes through, and you'd need backlighting at night. Soundslike a better idea for placing in a wall between rooms.
Of course, they'd have a heck of a time coming up with a name to market these under... since Windows is already taken.
"Oooh, aaahhh, Windows for Windows..."
Name several .01 words I have in my corpus.
In the game of statistics, you may not necessarily reside at the center of the bell-curve, but any saavy marketeer could probably work them out to those who do reside there.
Hmm. Unless those 32k+ games are really 32767 variations on Tetris and a couple FPS I'd agree. What we really need is a open platform. Even ID started out with the humble beginnings, growing out of shareware. IIRC the GP32 was supposed to encourage outside development, relying on profits from sale of hardware, unlike Sony, Nintendo, Xbox.
And no doubt there are lurkers who keenly follow the discussions, a la Rambus, to go back and refine their spamming technique. I'm sure the opposing terms are arranged to throw off the statistical model, i.e offset a few .99 words with several .01 words.
In retrospect, I dumped 300+ spams yesterday and the messages are becoming increasingly surreal as they attempt to bypass filtering. It seems a safe bet that anyone filtering spam, themselves, is already wary and a waste of effort to spam. I'm so jaded by it that my email client is set to display email only in text format. No HTML, no plugins, nuthin.
So the solution appears to be a combination of statistics and mechanical (programmed) filters. i.e. strip the commented text then run the remainder past the statistical database.
And Spam will no doubt evlove, it that's the word for it, it's so absurd lately that I suggest 'mutate' as more descriptive.
Too bad the feds don't just stop arguing about free speech rights of direct marketers and instead throw a few million into Superbowl halftime ads ridculing anyone stoopid enough to fall for spam, maybe display a quick URL for people to link to for educational purposes. The damage from such a salvo should nip the problem considerably.
Silhouetted figure:"Hi, my name is Bob. I responded to a Spam at work. I lost my job because the link took me to a pr0n site. I also lost all my money because I replied to one of those 'Resuce your debt' messages. My wife, kids and dog left me and even my neighbours laugh behind my back. I guess Spam isn't at all honest."
Republicans spam, too.
If only I'd given a different address for each I could figue out definitively who the culprit is.
Unfortunately, it might work at first, but we've seen offtopic posters and first posters evolve. Alas, they seem to be a form of semi-intelligent life and once their numbers start to dwindle you can almost bet some internet environmentalist society will crop up and declare them endangered "where once, great herds of them swept majestically across the plains, now only a few cling to the ever encroaching egalitarian dark forces of the internet.
It's probably just easier to round them up and send them to Guantanamo.
The irony is, Spam evolves, yet people still fall for spam. If it didn't work, we'd have seen the last of it years ago.
I've downloaded MailWasher and have just started looking through it (so I don't know what it uses for filtering.) I've noticed a lot of the recent junk is html with the ploy spelled among comment tags, i.e.:
Are any of the filters able to handle these?
Lastly, has anyone ever bother to combat spam with spam? I.e. send out a letter explaining what people are likely to get, aside from their credit card charged out to a pr0n site, sugar pills, photocopies of something you can find in any library, identity theft, etc. ?
Rest assured, if you are an american, you probably break half a dozen islamic laws, as laid down by the supreme council of Iran, before breakfast.
On the contrary, I applaud Dimitri Sklyarov and feel his work was construct, in the face of unjust legislation the USA exports and tries to exert on other peoples. It should be the choice of each sovereign nation to determine the extent of copyright/patent protection to inventors. One country, such as the USA, may attempt to hold all others in thrall as long as the life of intellectual property protection.
Besides, Kevin didn't attempt to bypass electronic IP safeguards, except as the DMCA may regard hacking. He revealed the swisscheese security of information systems in their infancy. He made people afraid, powerful people. We already, well most of us, are aware what sort of democracy-for-sale the Congress and Administration are, when their friends sneeze, they catch cold, and act within or without the law. It's a matter for the defendant to pry him/herself out of such a mess. As often as such examples play it's remarkable anyone wants to open themselves to such harrassment, particularly without alerting the ACLU or some group ahead of time that they intend to demonstrate how unjust the system is, in whole or part.
Anyone remember the 414's? A group of young men in the Milwaukee area who, when caught breaking into DEC systems wanted to sell movie rights? It wasn't too hard to figure how they did it, hell, I was admin on a DEC system and there were default passwords and field service passwords easy enough to guess. You just had to be bored and stupid enough to go trespassing.
I have plenty of sympathy for those treated unjustly, but those who go alone to spread fear among powerful interests are no more clever than a swimmer dogpaddling around in a shark tank.
he has a book to sell and a consulting business to build. (Don't forget: Kevin hasn't been able to make much money for a number of years, and has a lot of lost time to make up for.)
Knowing all this as the result of your choice, would you choose this path again? If so, why?