Slashdot Mirror


User: Keybounce

Keybounce's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
350
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 350

  1. Re:whitelisting with regexp on Regex Golf, xkcd, and Peter Norvig · · Score: 1

    Thank you.

    Now, do you have a good way to deal with messages that are two-lines instead of one line?

    And what's wrong with apple's grep? I've been using the gnu one, just because the macports gnu base package installs so many things...

  2. Re:whitelisting with regexp on Regex Golf, xkcd, and Peter Norvig · · Score: 1

    Alright, can you provide your scripts that generate the log checkers?

    I can use that.

  3. Re:RegExps on Regex Golf, xkcd, and Peter Norvig · · Score: 1

    You will be truly amazed by the number of people who copy a not-working example...

    You mean when Microsoft distributes a sample driver with a bug in it?

  4. Re:Words, words on Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe · · Score: 1

    I think that this is a great article, but...

    It is obvious that there are parts of the universe that are not (and never have been) causally connected with our universe.Those are just the parts of our universe we can't see, which are inevitable in an infinite universe with a finite duration and a finite speed of light. You don't need either quantum mechanics or inflation for that, and it has never been called the "multiverse."

    So let me try to explain it this way.

    We have an observable universe.

    If you were at the far end of our observable universe, and asked "what is the observable universe from here?", you'd get a different observable universe.

    Repeat this process. You have many different observable universe patches that overlap.

    Join them as a union. You have a "master observable universe".

    No matter how much you try, you cannot cover *EVERYTHING*.

    If the old view -- inflation happened, and then stopped -- were true, you would have everything. Might take you a very long time (even Einstein wasn't sure the universe was finite), but you would.

    This is saying that some areas are just outside of any such overlapping collections of observable universes.

  5. Re:Not the quantum mechanical multiverse on Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe · · Score: 1

    I did read the article.

    In a nutshell: once you look at the inflation not as a binary yes/no behavior, but as a quantum behavior with "yes over here, no over there, sort-of way over there", you find that while inflation stops in some areas, it continues in other areas.

    It assumes the same laws of physics everywhere -- specifically quantum mechanics -- and concludes that there will be areas disconnected by inflation that cannot interact, that behave like disconnected universes.

    The expansion rate will vary for a universe dominated by radiation energy, matter, or vaccum energy.

    And, the key lines:

    But you’ve got to remember, this field that causes inflation—whatever it’s true nature is—is likely to be a quantum field/particle, like everything else in the Universe.

    But if we allow inflation to be a quantum field instead—and of course it must be one—you have to calculate how quickly it spreads vs. how much the Universe inflates vs. how quickly it rolls down the hill

    Although inflation will end in more than 50% of the Universe at any given time, enough of the quantum field that dictates its behavior will undergo quantum “spreading” back towards the exponentially stable expansion state so that inflation lasts an eternity. And this is true for every model of slow-roll inflation we’ve concocted!

    I don't know enough to peer-check this article. But the idea -- that if a quantum effect is responsible, then it has a waveform, and is not a point-behavior but has a probability spread -- makes sense.

  6. Re:Identifying malicious code first on Oracle Promises Patches Next Week For 36 Exploits In Latest Java · · Score: 1

    How should the end user identify malicious code before downloading and running it?

    Easy. Load it into a sandboxed simulator, and see what it does. It can't escape the sandbox, right?

    Oh, right.

  7. Re: trust on Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute '51% Attack' · · Score: 1

    Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot?

    This is addressed by the newspaper headline embedded in the genesis block. There's no conceivable way to embed that headline in advance. Any block that doesn't ultimately link back to the genesis block is invalid, so it doesn't matter how many blocks he previously created.

    Actually, this is very serious the issue.

    Early bitcoin mining was fast, cheap, and generated lots of bitcoin for very little effort.

    If bitcoin had died, that would have been wasted.
    Instead, it's ... extremely large amounts of potential wealth horded by a very small group of early adopters, and the people who came up with this in the first place are the earliest adopters.

    Instead of people who inherited, or who can manipulate the dollar, the political behavior, the banking industry, etc, gaining all the money, it's now the people who manipulate others into saying "Hey, this new currency is better" who are gaining all the money.

    Either way, it's inherently biased and unfair. It's not based on the work you do / what you contribute, it's based on what you started with; who/what you knew/did early.

  8. Re:Here's at least one reason this is happening on US Federal Judge Rules Suspicionless Border Searches of Laptops Constitutional · · Score: 1

    Apparently, supreme court justices in a speeding car can tell the police officer who they are and get away with it.

    Happened at least once, and then a book was written with the incident mentioned.

    (No, I don't remember the details -- this was years ago)

  9. Re:Here's at least one reason this is happening on US Federal Judge Rules Suspicionless Border Searches of Laptops Constitutional · · Score: 1

    Why the bleep don't we fire this guy?

    "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior" -- this is clear evidence of failing to do his job.

    He is appointed to protect and defend the constitution. Not to protect and defend the borders.
    He is unable to perform a basic function -- reading and understanding the evidence -- as well as unable to perform a basic requirement of the job -- critical analysis of what people tell him.

    All of this points to failure to do his job, and possibly incompetence at his job. And, a lack of good behavior at his job.

    What, are you going to say that a judge has lifetime tenure? I don't see that in the constitution. Who said that? Oh, another judge? What gave them the power to give themselves lifetime job security when the Constitution does not?

  10. Peer Review on Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans · · Score: 1

    This is the sort of study that demands peer review.

    It is far beyond me to understand the details of this study, and it's claims. But it is absolutely fascinating, if true, even taking the Male-only Y and Female-only Mit inheritance factors into account.

    When I see things like

    We used coalescent simulations ... The best-fitting models in Africa and Europe are very different. In Africa ... numbers expanded approximately 50-fold. In Europe ... as soon as the major R1b lineage entered Europe ... expanded more than a thousandfold.

    then I know enough to know that the assumptions used matter, but also that I don't know enough to evaluate those assumptions.

  11. Re:Government Involvement on How 3 Young Coders Built a Better Portal To HealthCare.gov · · Score: 1

    Actually, the 13th amendment specifically permits slavery.

    Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

    Someone who has been found guilty, and sentenced to jail, can be forced to work for the government (involuntary servitude) or lose other rights besides mobility and/or liberty (slavery).

    If the "3/5th" rule were enforced, then states that take the view "you are our slave" would lose representation, and have a reason to NOT make them slaves.

  12. Re:If it's don't work. Try this on Credit Card Numbers Still Google-able · · Score: 1

    Aha! It does not. So if someone did follow your advice, then ...

    (did I just feed a troll?)

  13. Re:If it's don't work. Try this on Credit Card Numbers Still Google-able · · Score: 1

    But if that were true, then when someone posted the "Test" case of
    4111 1111 1111 1111
    then it should have been obscured.

    I'll test that right now

  14. Re:iGoogle Disaster on The Case Against Gmail · · Score: 1

    Emacs can be told to monitor CPU temperature?

    Can it turn the kitchen sink on and off as well?

  15. Re:Pathetic on Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving On Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    Canned tuna. About 50 to 60 cents per can; about 1.5 meals per can. Eat 2/3rds of it now, and keep the rest for a snack in 2 hours. Combine with a banana.

    "Meal bars" -- some are basically soy protein plus vitamins and carbs. For about $1.25, you get a complete, but small, meal.

    What do both of these approaches lack? Fat. For some reason, our society thinks "fat is bad", when it's not only necessary, researchers say it's actually a better fuel than sugar for 75% of the population.

  16. Re:Oh my god on Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving On Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    And how many of those are filled by either fresh-out-of-school, too-young-to-know-their-value graduates, or by people imported through the "high tech visa"s?

    "We can't fill this job, so there must not be a supply in the US, so we have to import" -- that's what people say to washington.

    Not: "We're not willing to pay what this is worth, and actually train people who are skilled in how to use our system, so give us cheap people from overseas instead".

  17. Re:Would probably be found on Linus Torvalds Admits He's Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux · · Score: 1

    Nothing, and I mean nothing gets into the kernel without highly skilled devs reviewing it first. Sure, they could make a mistake, but saying that it might happen because nobody is really looking is ridiculous.

    The old random number generator, that I believe affected every distribution of linux.

    The bugged cryptography library / key generator that shipped for over a year, that I believe affected one distribution.

    There are plenty of ways that a given section of code can only be understood by just a few people. Why constant X and not Y? Why is elliptical generation this way and not that way? Why insert a shift left one bit?

    Heck, a more down to earth issue: How long was it before NTFS was understood well enough to be able to write to it in every case, given some strange features that had to be "black-boxed" reversed before they were understood -- and are you sure that there is 100% compatibility today?

    That's just the areas that I know about; I'm sure other people have other issues that they keep aware of.

    ===

    A much higher level question: Why is any program allowed to use getHostByName(), struct sockaddr, or decide to open a connection to machine X on it's own, without having to go through a system policy?

    That's not a silly question. Yes, I know the history -- those had to be in user code when networking was changing 6 times a year. But for at least a decade, if not more, that hasn't been the case -- and there is nothing you can do to ensure that 100% of all traffic goes out through tor, is there?

    I'm not calling struct sockaddr a back door; I'm calling it a security design flaw. I'm calling the whole "no program can write to the disk without OS control, but any program can write to any place on the network without any control" a security flaw. Heck, you could argue that being able to determine your real IP address is a flaw -- even if a spy had to send it out over tor, that spy could still reveal who you were.

    [FYI, the alternative would be to eliminate the distinction between a socket descriptor and a file descriptor, and have network end-points created by open("/dev/net/hostname:port", O_RDRW) or something similar.]

  18. Make it easier to report bugs, that's how on How Do You Get Better Bug Reports From Users? · · Score: 1

    Very often, I have absolutely minor bugs and problems that show up briefly, in passing. Not only is it hard to spend the time to replicate and figure out exactly how/why for someone that wants a "detailed report with reproducable steps" (ick!), I'm in the middle of ... you know, _DOING_ something. So I have to go back later?

    Sigh.

    What have I found to be the best way to demonstrate bugs? A full screen recording of what I'm doing. I'm not being silly here.

    I'm in a beta test (NDA) for a new version of a program. When I'm playing with the beta software, I turn on the video recorder, and record EVERYTHING I'm doing. That company has actually thanked me for this approach.

    While using OSX, I find plenty of little things, several times a day; by the time I've realized it, it's past and done, and I can't give you details on how/why. Do I report it as best I can? Used to. Gave up as "pointless/why bother".

    I've seen people in this thread saying "Log everything, let the user hit "bug!" and all details are sent to you". I've seen people say "Record everything, snapshot everything, etc". And ... that's a good first step.

    But is it enough? If I have a cursor that is supposed to change as I move around, and it only sometimes changes, sometimes does not, how do I log that? How do I report it? Reproducibility is pathetically poor.

    How do you record and log your interaction with something else? In theory, the same events and responses that your program is / should be doing is what you'd be recording, right? So if the recording/logging works, your program does. Right?

    If I have a problem with a USB drive and a loose connector, that leads to system disasters, and the view is "Won't fix the underlying cause because a disconnected drive has to be considered completely dirty for the worst possible potential situation", even if most such cases can be proven to be no where near that worst case, then what?

    If I have a problem where a system program reaches "kill -9 does not work" about once a week, then what?

    If I report a bug that is closed as "duplicate of bug #y", but I cannot follow bug #y, get no status updates, no feedback, etc, then why would I bother?

    Make it easy for users to submit bugs.
    Make it easy for users to tell you what happened.

    Never put up a panel with text that cannot be copy/pasted.
    Never put up a panel that won't fit on small screens if a lot of text is displayed.

    If you are getting bad reports from people, start asking, not "what caused this bug?", but "What would help you provide better information next time?".

    And make it so easy for people to report bugs that they can do it one-handed.
    You will get bad reports. Don't try to prevent those.

  19. Html, in it's simplest form, is simple text on HTTP 2.0 Will Be a Binary Protocol · · Score: 1

    With all this discussion about different types of detail and complexity, and the need to do massive coding to properly handle all forms of HTML headers, I'm reminded of a discussion I had once with a back-end designer.

    He had made a system designed to work via http. When I asked why, and mentioned all the overhead and everything, he had a real simple response.

    Essentially: the application wasn't a full powered web server. In it's simplest form, an http request is "open a socket, write a string, read a string, close socket". By designing it to look like http, and work over port 80, it fits into modern corporate systems, gets past most firewalls, etc.

    The result? Sure, you could send crazy http thingies to this server; it would just return an error. But it was able to work with the expected use case -- send data to the server, get a response back. Plain text. Easy to work with.

    What happens to such a system once everything becomes binary? No longer so simple.

    Does this help the typical user? If the concern is over the per-file TCP overhead/startup, there is already a way to re-use a single TCP connection for multiple file transfers. If the concern is over the size of the headers, there is a much better way to ... you know, remove all the junk, cookies, extra headers, etc, than just trying to shrink text labels down (which is about all you can do if you want to keep the data content the same). If the concern is over "Perceived browser speed", well, let me remind you of Larry Wall's "rn" versus the previous dominant news reader -- and how "rn" would parse and display on the fly, instead of having to read the entire thing in before displaying. Or compare Safari to Firefox -- again, firefox starts displaying faster than Safari, so I can start reading the page sooner. Or, compare ....

    Do not assume that "perceived slowness" is caused by a bad protocol.
    It may be caused by a bad user agent.

    If the page has to be fully loaded before being displayed, that's one thing.
    If you can load the entire base text of a page, put it up, and then go back and start loading the images, or sounds, or flash thingies, that's another.
    If you don't like all the screen jumping, well guess what? You can open a bunch of separate TCP/http connections, read just enough from each to determine size, and then stop reading -- let the socket data stop coming -- and put up the text of the page, the placeholders for what you need, and then, once the base information is up, then go back and read the rest without the "jumping" and resizing.

    Does any of this require binary?

    The goals of 2.0:

    1. Substantially and measurably improve end-user perceived latency in most cases, over HTTP/1.1 using TCP.

    That's a user agent behavior problem.

    3. Not require multiple connections to a server to enable parallelism, thus improving its use of TCP, especially regarding congestion control.

    That requires a way to say "Here is control data", and "Here is content data". Sure, that would help a great deal, if as a user agent, while reading a text blob for a web page, I see that I need to open a TCP channel for an image to determine it's size. I currently have to either wait for the web page text to finish, or open a new TCP channel to get the image. What can avoid this? If I am now having to send ACK's and NACK's back to the server during my read, I can also send a "Put on hold -- now give me Y instead". So this is a "win" for this behavior -- I can now reuse the same TCP channel, and get the beginning of another data stream, determine size, etc, and then get back to the first file. So clearly, this goal is a good goal, right? There are no flaws in the goal of using a single TCP channel to send multiple data streams, right?

    Right?

    No one could possibly see any flaws with transmission speed by saying that the sender is going to stop sending, and come to a complete halt until the receiver has synchronized, right?

    It's a tradeoff. The old way re

  20. Re:Know your audience, where they came from on The Plight of Star Wars Droids · · Score: 1

    There is dispute ( http://scifi.about.com/od/Star-Wars-Worlds/a/Endor-Holocaust.htm , http://www.pdfio.com/k-769767.html, etc) as to whether or not this "Endor Holocaust" actually happened or was just Imperial Propaganda.

  21. YouTube doesn't have a download button?!? on Microsoft YouTube App Strips Ads; Adds Download · · Score: 1

    > You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube

    But ... I do see a "download" button, on every YouTube page, I think it's right next to the like and dislike buttons.

    And I agree: Absolutely standard. Oh, and you left out the standard, built-in firefox sync. Or that I'm using 17ESR so that I have the same profiles even from my 10.5 PPC macs that don't officially support it but still work (TenFourFox).

    I've had that download button from YouTube for years. Is that EULA implying that they'll remove it?

  22. Re:Never trust an "app" to do anything. on Snapchats Don't Disappear · · Score: 1

    If you wanted actual security, you'd use a real program to do it instead of an app.

    If you wanted actual security, you wouldn't have it on a computer.

    If you wanted actual security, you wouldn't send it to someone else's computer.

    If you wanted actual security, you would ensure that no other computer could access the files on your computer.

  23. Re:But on Colbert on Snapchats Don't Disappear · · Score: 1

    Sure it can. I've seen it on Mission Impossible.

    And didn't we see that on Mythbusters?

  24. Re:Warranty or insurance? on Is Buying an Extended Warranty Ever a Good Idea? · · Score: 1

    In addition to that, there was this one time that I had an electrician out for a home warranty repair. $60 (my copay) for just under an hour of work.

    I had asked him what this would have cost if he had not been working for the insurance company, and I had called him directly. I got a shock.

    He told me that the last company he worked for, the owner had a policy of sending out two people. No matter which of the two people you paid attention to, the other would manage to find some sort of major electrical problem. Inflated problems, excessive workers and time, and in some cases outright false claims of problems at the breaker box or elsewhere.

    Simply put: The home warranty people work with so many cases and problems that they insist on, and get, good performance without massive time delays or fake problems. So while I may pay more (to give them a profit), they are also working to keep down the amount of problems I run into from the repair people.

  25. Re:Israel never had a claim to legitimacy. on Google Formally Puts Palestine On Virtual Map · · Score: 1

    Jews were less than 10% of the area population in 1900. When Zionists "declared independence" they were only 31% of the population...

    Ok, I am bleeping tired of this.

    Why do you look at 1900? What was the population in 1800? Or 1200? Or 3500 BCE?

    When you say that only 31% were this group of people, what about when a bunch of upstarts said that the British Colonies were no longer part of Britain? How many people were loyal british citizens, and how many were angry rebels that engaged in high treason?

    We celebrate high treason every year in this country, on the fourth of july, when we insisted that the old view of "country" was now wrong, and needed to change.

    At some point in the past, that idea, that concept, has happened everywhere (*) on this planet where people lived.

    So you seem to be saying that this idea, when applied in one spot by the United Nations after WW2, was in error, but every other time was valid?

    You are so biased that you really need to hear yourself.

    *: No citation or research done. Number pulled out of thin air based on limited observation over similar areas. Actual number is expected to be over 95%, but 100% cannot be tested nor verified. Use at own risk. May contain nuts.