The Dilbert Blog (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/) Postsecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) Xkcd (http://blag.xkcd.com/)
Joel on Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) Stevey's blog rants (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/) Paul Graham's essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/)
Not to mention webcomics, but I think that's another Ask Slashdot. I also use my reader to keep up on news about particular events, like PDC 2008.
In the US at least, paper (and most lumber) is made from trees that are farmed. The more paper you use, the more trees are planted. Paperless distribution costs energy every second you spend reading the document.
AppleInsider also keeps saying that Apple is working on a Tablet Mac, which presumably is a TabletPC-esque convertible Macbook which uses Ink Services and handwriting recognition.
I work as a software engineer at Wacom Technologies. If Apple were going to make such a device, they would be using our hardware, and likely some of our software. They have not, so there is likely no such project. AppleInsider is posting items from their wishlist.
I worked on products using CE 4.2 and 5.0, and we had the source then. Most of it's there, just not some deep kernel internals (like the scheduler). The SS license is a bit restrictive, but hey: whatyagonnado.
I think they're lowering the cost for everyone. It turns out that most companies that are making a CE product want the source. MS didn't charge for it (well, the CE licenses were pretty expensive to begin with), and it was just costing everybody lawyer-hours.
You're right - Ruby actually IS looking up every method call in a hashtable at runtime. I know this is hard to swallow, but it doesn't matter (OCTAOE).
What you're seeing is the dragon of Premature Optimization. In only one case out of a hundred thousand is your performance bottleneck the mechanism for calling functions. It doesn't make sense to spend a hundred hours optimizing your application so that a 500ms SQL call is performed 1ms sooner.
And it's hard. Most coders I know love to tweak the bits, find that extra cycle of performance out of a function, save that extra 4 bytes of memory. But in the real world, your time is better spent elsewhere. Write your tests, get it working, and move on. Later, run a profiling tool, and speed up the parts that are slowest.
Using a more powerful set of tools gets you to that "later" a LOT faster. A compiler is only one of those tools.
First off, you're assuming the documents are stored on the web server. They're not. You can import a Word file, edit for a bit, and save it out to another Word file on your local drive. Nothing (outside of session data) is given to the server.
It's not a full replacement for Office - MS has actually been adding some nifty features like Office Communicator - but it's handy if you've got your resume on a USB key, and need to edit it when you're in the library.
Wish granted. I'm at the conference, and one of the biggest features they're touting in WM5 is Office integration. There's what amounts to a full Outlook client included with the OS.
I'm actually at the conference, and I can confirm some of this. WM5 integrates pretty smoothly with Outlook; aside from whiz-bang crap (take a picture with your phone, attach the picture to an Outlook contact, show the photo in all emails), it looks pretty good.
Also, this isn't just for phones - it's the next generation of the PDA OS as well, so it supports many screen form factors, with or without keyboard, etc.
"Bullet manufacturing" isn't some centralized industrial setup. I have a friend who loads his own rounds in his garage (brass casing + powder + bullet + pull lever = round).
What you're suggesting is something akin to requiring every compiler to embed a serial number in every executable it generates so we can track virus writers. Easily circumvented by writing your own linker, or opening up a hex editor.
There's optimization, and there's premature optimization. I'm no Paul Graham zealot, but he's got it right here; until you find out exactly which part of your program is the bottleneck, you're likely wasting your time.
Instruction-by-instruction optimization by hand is only productive for guys like John Carmack, where each nanosecond really does count. If you're really worried about this, why not just write it in assembly?
Bellster actually defends from leeching. From Bellster's website:
The Bellster Network keeps a tally of calls that you make and that you give to others. It's like getting a calling card that starts with a few credits. One credit is used for each call and you get credits for each call that you give. As long as your balance remains positive, you can place calls.
Also, without having run a node myself, I assume you can limit the routing of calls to local numbers only, or only those numbers that you choose to expose. So you're safe from somebody using your phone to call their mail-order-bride in Kazakhstan, but if you live in Washington, D.C., and somebody uses your phone to call in a bomb threat on the White House, you may still be in trouble. Unless you were smart; then you could provide the call log to the Secret Service when they come a-knocking.
Why not have a bar-code on every dollar bill that can validate each bill.
They effectively do. The serial number is printed in a standardized OCR font. The mobile scanner product I'm hacking on right now can read four OCR fonts, and "US Currency" is one of them (the type used on checks is another). The hardware we're using comes from one of the largest suppliers, so pretty much any 2D-capable scanning product out there can already read the serial number on US bills.
This doesn't hurt Apple in any way; it just makes it so that people don't have to use iTunes to play music over their Airport Express. Since you still have to buy the Airport, and it costs Apple money to distribute iTunes, I don't see how this can be considered a bad thing.
In fact, companies should probably get used to the idea that their "secrets" aren't very secret. It just takes one talented geek to crack the case. Let's face it: it's either this or The Right to Read.
Sorry, but I've got to answer this, even though it goes against Slashthink.
First, the "MY parents can't afford" hit was a bit below the belt. Have you ever borrowed a $20 from your parents? Probably because you needed/wanted it, and you didn't have it, right? Bill III did the same thing, only the scale is different - and he (a) made something on the money, and (b) paid it back in full, both of which I doubt about your parents' $20.
Second, vast accumulation of wealth is not bad for the economy. The USA has the largest number of super-rich people in the world, and our per-capita GDP is also one of the largest. Where's the evidence that having super-rich people is harmful? In fact, show me a super-rich person who isn't funding economic growth (through stock purchases or direct loans to entrepeneurs).
The current generation of RFID tags (Gen2) specifies that tags are to include a "kill" function to avoid just this type of scenario. Basically, if a tag reader issues the "kill" command, the tag destroys itself, and will no longer respond to any reader at all.
There's password protection to avoid the obvious method of theft, but I'm not sure how secure that is. Plus, it would be easily detectable if someone were using an unauthorized reader inside the store; they're literally broadcasting their position and what they're trying to do.
Not really. It would just mean that Wal-Mart's product database would have to be weeded for nonexistant products (which your tags would trigger), and the readers would have to be good at weeding out invalid tags (which they already are).
Also, we're ignoring the antenna length. If the tag has a 1/16" antenna, you'll be lucky to read the tag from two inches away, much less from half the width of the currently-installed gateways.
Transmission ranges on these things are VERY short. Keep in mind that the FCC regulates how much power you can pump through a reader, and that the tag is powered entirely by this transmission. With an RFID tag mounted to the pricetag on a shirt, you'll be lucky to get 3 feet of transmission. Also, the tag will most likely be killed right after the customer's credit card is charged, so sitting outside the door won't get you any data at all.
In answer to your first question, fairly difficult. You'd need an active device which listens for a query from a reader, and responds as though it were a tag. Also, the tag is just responding with essentially the same data as a barcode; any code that isn't in the master database in the sky will be ignored. And the readers can handle a large number of tags (read rate for some readers is >1000 tags/sec, and will only get better), so a DoS will be pretty difficult. Not something you'd wire-wrap in your garage.
I work kind of tangentially on my company's RFID products, so I don't know everything. From what I understand, Gen2 tags (shaping up to be the standard) support read, write, and kill operations. Reading can be done by anyone, but writing and killing may have password protection. If the password is not set, anybody can write or kill a tag.
I'm not sure about security on the password exchange, but with how little thought seems to have gone into the other "standards", I wouldn't be surprised if it was plaintext.
One can only be said to be a hypocrite if one associates with a set of ethics, and then violates them. If one does hold to a set of ethics, one will inevitably violate them (at least, if one is human). So the only way to avoid violating your ethics is to not have any. So let's frame it like this: is it better to have a code of ethics or not?
Oh, and here's a quote:
So yes I will say that not only is the Bush admin hypocritical for censoring stuff on the air, but for also blasting John Kerry for saying thsoe[sic] words but doing it themselves!
Do you have a direct quote of anyone at the Bush adminstration blasting Kerry for his diction? This is where I thought you were connecting Limbaugh (since he presumably did) with the Bush administration (which may have).
Neal Stephenson made a great point about this in "The Diamond Age." In his fictional world, moral relativism progressed to the point that hypocrisy was the only sin you could call someone on, and to be inconsistent was to invite ridicule. So the only safe bet (as a politician) was to have no moral code at all. Contradicting yourself isn't a sin; it's natural, especially in the case of an entire administration, which is made of thousands of people.
Someone here on/. also made a good point in the discussion on the use of torture in wartime. (S)he said something to the effect of "Just because what we're doing isn't as bad as what they're doing doesn't make it OK; it makes both sides wrong." What Cheney said, whether Leahey deserved it or not, was inappropriate, and he's paying for it. Whether Kerry was right or not about postwar planning in Iraq, he's paying for it.
It's also germane to note that Mr. Limbaugh is NOT part of the Bush administration, so taking his views as though Bush said them is a mistake. You could say the same about Kerry and Al Franken. He's a bit of a nutjob, and everyone knows it.
Does anybody have a source where a representative of the current administration actually uses the term "un-American"? That meme has been bandied about quite a bit, but where did it come from? Is the Executive branch responsible, or is this another case of out-of-control media?
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly I use Google Reader to keep all the blogs I read in one place. A representative sample, and feeds I highly recommend:
Coding horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/)
Raganwald (http://weblog.raganwald.com/)
The Dilbert Blog (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/)
Postsecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/)
Xkcd (http://blag.xkcd.com/)
Joel on Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)
Stevey's blog rants (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/)
Paul Graham's essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/)
Not to mention webcomics, but I think that's another Ask Slashdot. I also use my reader to keep up on news about particular events, like PDC 2008.
In the US at least, paper (and most lumber) is made from trees that are farmed. The more paper you use, the more trees are planted. Paperless distribution costs energy every second you spend reading the document.
Hamster
AppleInsider also keeps saying that Apple is working on a Tablet Mac, which presumably is a TabletPC-esque convertible Macbook which uses Ink Services and handwriting recognition.
I work as a software engineer at Wacom Technologies. If Apple were going to make such a device, they would be using our hardware, and likely some of our software. They have not, so there is likely no such project. AppleInsider is posting items from their wishlist.
-- Hamster
I worked on products using CE 4.2 and 5.0, and we had the source then. Most of it's there, just not some deep kernel internals (like the scheduler). The SS license is a bit restrictive, but hey: whatyagonnado.
I think they're lowering the cost for everyone. It turns out that most companies that are making a CE product want the source. MS didn't charge for it (well, the CE licenses were pretty expensive to begin with), and it was just costing everybody lawyer-hours.
-- Hamster
What you're seeing is the dragon of Premature Optimization. In only one case out of a hundred thousand is your performance bottleneck the mechanism for calling functions. It doesn't make sense to spend a hundred hours optimizing your application so that a 500ms SQL call is performed 1ms sooner.
And it's hard. Most coders I know love to tweak the bits, find that extra cycle of performance out of a function, save that extra 4 bytes of memory. But in the real world, your time is better spent elsewhere. Write your tests, get it working, and move on. Later, run a profiling tool, and speed up the parts that are slowest.
Using a more powerful set of tools gets you to that "later" a LOT faster. A compiler is only one of those tools.
First off, you're assuming the documents are stored on the web server. They're not. You can import a Word file, edit for a bit, and save it out to another Word file on your local drive. Nothing (outside of session data) is given to the server.
It's not a full replacement for Office - MS has actually been adding some nifty features like Office Communicator - but it's handy if you've got your resume on a USB key, and need to edit it when you're in the library.
-- Hamster
Wish granted. I'm at the conference, and one of the biggest features they're touting in WM5 is Office integration. There's what amounts to a full Outlook client included with the OS.
Hamster
I'm actually at the conference, and I can confirm some of this. WM5 integrates pretty smoothly with Outlook; aside from whiz-bang crap (take a picture with your phone, attach the picture to an Outlook contact, show the photo in all emails), it looks pretty good.
Also, this isn't just for phones - it's the next generation of the PDA OS as well, so it supports many screen form factors, with or without keyboard, etc.
Hamster
"Bullet manufacturing" isn't some centralized industrial setup. I have a friend who loads his own rounds in his garage (brass casing + powder + bullet + pull lever = round).
What you're suggesting is something akin to requiring every compiler to embed a serial number in every executable it generates so we can track virus writers. Easily circumvented by writing your own linker, or opening up a hex editor.
-- Hamster
Instruction-by-instruction optimization by hand is only productive for guys like John Carmack, where each nanosecond really does count. If you're really worried about this, why not just write it in assembly?
Hamster
I'm surrounded by Assholes!
-- Hamster
-- Hamster
Just testing. Is commenting down?
-- Hamster
What about manufacturing-related emissions? Transportation? Natural-gas water heaters?
Hamster
They effectively do. The serial number is printed in a standardized OCR font. The mobile scanner product I'm hacking on right now can read four OCR fonts, and "US Currency" is one of them (the type used on checks is another). The hardware we're using comes from one of the largest suppliers, so pretty much any 2D-capable scanning product out there can already read the serial number on US bills.
Hamster
This doesn't hurt Apple in any way; it just makes it so that people don't have to use iTunes to play music over their Airport Express. Since you still have to buy the Airport, and it costs Apple money to distribute iTunes, I don't see how this can be considered a bad thing.
In fact, companies should probably get used to the idea that their "secrets" aren't very secret. It just takes one talented geek to crack the case. Let's face it: it's either this or The Right to Read.
Hamster
Sorry, but I've got to answer this, even though it goes against Slashthink.
First, the "MY parents can't afford" hit was a bit below the belt. Have you ever borrowed a $20 from your parents? Probably because you needed/wanted it, and you didn't have it, right? Bill III did the same thing, only the scale is different - and he (a) made something on the money, and (b) paid it back in full, both of which I doubt about your parents' $20.
Second, vast accumulation of wealth is not bad for the economy. The USA has the largest number of super-rich people in the world, and our per-capita GDP is also one of the largest. Where's the evidence that having super-rich people is harmful? In fact, show me a super-rich person who isn't funding economic growth (through stock purchases or direct loans to entrepeneurs).
Hamster
Wow. We're all used to posters not Ring TFA, but you didn't even read the post.
Hamster
The current generation of RFID tags (Gen2) specifies that tags are to include a "kill" function to avoid just this type of scenario. Basically, if a tag reader issues the "kill" command, the tag destroys itself, and will no longer respond to any reader at all.
There's password protection to avoid the obvious method of theft, but I'm not sure how secure that is. Plus, it would be easily detectable if someone were using an unauthorized reader inside the store; they're literally broadcasting their position and what they're trying to do.
Hamster
Not really. It would just mean that Wal-Mart's product database would have to be weeded for nonexistant products (which your tags would trigger), and the readers would have to be good at weeding out invalid tags (which they already are).
Also, we're ignoring the antenna length. If the tag has a 1/16" antenna, you'll be lucky to read the tag from two inches away, much less from half the width of the currently-installed gateways.
Hamster
Transmission ranges on these things are VERY short. Keep in mind that the FCC regulates how much power you can pump through a reader, and that the tag is powered entirely by this transmission. With an RFID tag mounted to the pricetag on a shirt, you'll be lucky to get 3 feet of transmission. Also, the tag will most likely be killed right after the customer's credit card is charged, so sitting outside the door won't get you any data at all.
In answer to your first question, fairly difficult. You'd need an active device which listens for a query from a reader, and responds as though it were a tag. Also, the tag is just responding with essentially the same data as a barcode; any code that isn't in the master database in the sky will be ignored. And the readers can handle a large number of tags (read rate for some readers is >1000 tags/sec, and will only get better), so a DoS will be pretty difficult. Not something you'd wire-wrap in your garage.
Hamster
I'm not sure about security on the password exchange, but with how little thought seems to have gone into the other "standards", I wouldn't be surprised if it was plaintext.
Hamster
Oh, and here's a quote:
Do you have a direct quote of anyone at the Bush adminstration blasting Kerry for his diction? This is where I thought you were connecting Limbaugh (since he presumably did) with the Bush administration (which may have).Hamster
Neal Stephenson made a great point about this in "The Diamond Age." In his fictional world, moral relativism progressed to the point that hypocrisy was the only sin you could call someone on, and to be inconsistent was to invite ridicule. So the only safe bet (as a politician) was to have no moral code at all. Contradicting yourself isn't a sin; it's natural, especially in the case of an entire administration, which is made of thousands of people.
/. also made a good point in the discussion on the use of torture in wartime. (S)he said something to the effect of "Just because what we're doing isn't as bad as what they're doing doesn't make it OK; it makes both sides wrong." What Cheney said, whether Leahey deserved it or not, was inappropriate, and he's paying for it. Whether Kerry was right or not about postwar planning in Iraq, he's paying for it.
Someone here on
It's also germane to note that Mr. Limbaugh is NOT part of the Bush administration, so taking his views as though Bush said them is a mistake. You could say the same about Kerry and Al Franken. He's a bit of a nutjob, and everyone knows it.
Hamster
Does anybody have a source where a representative of the current administration actually uses the term "un-American"? That meme has been bandied about quite a bit, but where did it come from? Is the Executive branch responsible, or is this another case of out-of-control media?