I've spent a lot of time and a lot of money on technical books. In order to save time and money, I've developed a rough analysis approach that will assess the quality of a technical book without having to read the whole thing before buying.
In general, if you go into one of the large, corporate McBooks outlets, and scan the technical titles, the following analysis will vet a 95% or better evaluation rate:
1. Font size. Inversely proportional to quality of the text.
2. Screen shots. Quality of the text is inversely proportional to the total area dedicated to screen shots. Windows dialog boxes count as double their physical area.
3. Quick Reference Icons. Sometimes the author feels necessary to come up with special icons which will be placed on a page to show you what's important. The quality of the book is inversely proportional to the number of these icons multiplied by the size of the icons.
4. Index. The quality of the book is proportional to the number of serious entries in the index. If there are less than five humorous entries, these humorous entries may be included in the above count. If there are more than ten humorous entries in the index, each should be considered as reducing the "serious" count by 10%.
5. Included stuff from the 'net. The quality score for the book is reduced for each appendix which merely includes reprints of stuff that's readily available online. Extra points off for reprinting publically available APIs. If I was going to code in an offline environment, I might want this, but I'm not going to code without a net connection.
Follow this system, and you won't be ripped off again!
Ah, let me let you in on the secret of 'leet Gadgetism.
I have a Kyocera Smartphone. It's a Palm device / digital cellphone combo. It does nice things like keeping your address book in one place, along with your schedule, and whatever else you happen to have in the 8 meg of memory.
The real advantage of this device, aside from the convenience, is 'leet Gadgeteer Points.
Some smarmy exec puffs out his chest in a meeting because he has a tiny, slick cell phone, and you can show that your phone, while bigger, contains a PalmOS device.
Some other marketroid shows off her wireless Palm device, and you demonstrate you can make phone calls on yours.
Some geek shows you that he can do email via his Blackberry, and you show him that you can ssh into his server from yours.
Some cute thing shows off that she can play silly games on her Nokia, you get her addicted to Jewelbox or something (with graphics!) on your phone.
You get into a debate about whether or not Balrogs have wings with a LoTR fan, and you can bring up the eText on your device in real time to bolster your argument.
Now, if you're a secure person, and don't need the ego strokes, you'll find that either it's a useful device because it keeps all your information together with your phone, or it's just another extraneous gadget to clutter your life, depending upon your personality.
It's idiom, with a meaning kinda like "manana" (Slashdot won't let me put the tilde over that first n) in Spanish. I guess the closest English equivalent would be "someday..."
Whenever you make a statement about what Jews believe, you're bound to be wrong, because you'll find some group of Jews who do believe the opposite.
Look up "Gehenna." It's a nasty place that (some) Jews believe the deceased go to for a period of time (up to a month; more precisely, up to the length of the period of shloshim) to be punished for sins and/or purified.
Gehenna is named for a valley near Jerusalem where the Cananites used to supposedly perform human sacrifice of children to Baal.
I'll second all of that, but the 6035 is more than basically a Palm III + Cell Phone. It's also a wireless modem and a voice note recorder.
It's also a really spiff ssh-1 wireless terminal.
It's a heck of a product. You can get 'em now for $100 with the rebate and commitment to Verizon (ack). But they've got a 700/1000 minute plan with long distance included and data calls just counting against minutes for $50/month.
At least with the most recent revisions of the ROM, they did a great job with the integration. It's all pretty natural and easy to use.
Well, I ssh into my servers from my Kyocera 6035 all the time.
When I go into places like Starbucks, people ask me "Dude, is that a phone, or a brick?" because it's bigger than their dinky little Motorolas. I laugh along with them, because by the time they get their double mocha frappaccinos, I've r00ted their box from my phone, and am tr0janizing their Outlook to send all their sensitive business plans to the competition, and their pr0n collections to their wives.
How much data? I've got is about 5 GB of digital photographs / scanned negatives, 1 GB of email archives, 1 GB of various and sundry text files, 100 MB of assorted MS Office-type documents, 100 MB of source code (only about half of which is in CVS), 500 MB of web site source material (Photoshop files, HTML, etc).
How much of it do I normally need at any given site at any given time? Not much. But when I need it, I want it available.
Common accounts? Yes, when I can manage it. Unfortunately, I don't have absolute control of all the machines, so I have to have "similar" accounts on some.
Use most? Depends on the task. I tend to pretty much round-robin.
What kind of data? See above.
Backup Medium? Hard drive in a spare Debian Linux box, using rdiff-backup.
I currently use rdiff-backup for backups, which is pretty cool. I probably should have mentioned that.
Unfortunately, much of the data I have is not sufficiently structured for an RDBMs. To be more specific, I have about 5 GB of digital photographs / scanned negatives, 1 GB of email archives, 1 GB of various and sundry text files, 100 MB of assorted MS Office-type documents, 100 MB of source code (only about half of which is in CVS), 500 MB of web site source material (Photoshop files, HTML, etc).
So I figure that the filesystem is the best database for this kind of information. But I could well be wrong!
Seems to me that either Allchin suffered some stroke or brain damage while in court, or this is all a big red herring.
You just don't get to Allchin's level and "accidentally" let slip something like a fundamental vulnerability in a protocol. M$ officials may make mistakes, but not like this. Not in a public forum. Not in front of a judge. Not where every news medium in the world will be covering the story.
My feeling is that this is all a distraction from something else. Every black hat on the planet is now probably checking out the Messaging protocol. My guess is that there's no smoking gun there. But maybe another protocol has problems.
Furthermore, it just doesn't make sense. An API exposes only what you want it to. It doesn't show you the vulnerabilities that exist "under the covers" unless they're titanically, apocalyptically stupid.
I'd like to know what it was that he's distracting us from...
And that's why it's a good idea to eat in nasty, unsanitary, hole-in-the-wall restaurants occasionally so you can keep your immune system in a good state of practice.
It kills me how hyporitical people are on free speech issues. To be consistent on free speech, if you fight for porn you have to fight for SPAM as well.
OK, I'll split hairs here. The difference is that I have to pay for the spam I receive. Admittedly, as a fraction of the bandwidth I pay for, it's not huge, but I do have to pay for it. And I pay for it whether I want to receive it or not. The same is not true for porn. I would have to actively seek out porn if I wanted it (except for all the spam porn, but that's another issue entirely).
As for community standards, it's an interesting problem. Countries like China (PR) apparently have made the decision to do it by geopolitical boundaries, whereas China (ROC) don't seem to filter at all.
The issue that I find interesting is that "communities" are no longer purely geographical or ethnic entities. I could be part of communities spread across the globe, with people I have never seen or met in person, while not knowing my nextdoor neighbor.
Perhaps eventually there will be a system where, when you go online, you will need to self-select communities to which you belong. Once you're in, your access will be limited to content that is appropriate for those communities.
Noone here is advocating nor supporting child porn. I'm certainly not.
The issue being discussed is whether we have a right to put otherwise perfectly legal material on the web that might be considered offensive to others. Child porn does not enter into this discussion, because it's not legal in any context.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least we know why your assignment is overdue.
"Usurious" is not a synonym for "exorbitant."
Other than that, I agree that pricing increases like this are not inevitable, but something that can be fought.
Of course, "Wallace & Gromit" is rhyming slang for "vomit."
But how many people knew that it was originally the name of a wassail?
(How many care?)
I've spent a lot of time and a lot of money on technical books. In order to save time and money, I've developed a rough analysis approach that will assess the quality of a technical book without having to read the whole thing before buying.
In general, if you go into one of the large, corporate McBooks outlets, and scan the technical titles, the following analysis will vet a 95% or better evaluation rate:
1. Font size. Inversely proportional to quality of the text.
2. Screen shots. Quality of the text is inversely proportional to the total area dedicated to screen shots. Windows dialog boxes count as double their physical area.
3. Quick Reference Icons. Sometimes the author feels necessary to come up with special icons which will be placed on a page to show you what's important. The quality of the book is inversely proportional to the number of these icons multiplied by the size of the icons.
4. Index. The quality of the book is proportional to the number of serious entries in the index. If there are less than five humorous entries, these humorous entries may be included in the above count. If there are more than ten humorous entries in the index, each should be considered as reducing the "serious" count by 10%.
5. Included stuff from the 'net. The quality score for the book is reduced for each appendix which merely includes reprints of stuff that's readily available online. Extra points off for reprinting publically available APIs. If I was going to code in an offline environment, I might want this, but I'm not going to code without a net connection.
Follow this system, and you won't be ripped off again!
Ah, let me let you in on the secret of 'leet Gadgetism.
I have a Kyocera Smartphone. It's a Palm device / digital cellphone combo. It does nice things like keeping your address book in one place, along with your schedule, and whatever else you happen to have in the 8 meg of memory.
The real advantage of this device, aside from the convenience, is 'leet Gadgeteer Points.
Some smarmy exec puffs out his chest in a meeting because he has a tiny, slick cell phone, and you can show that your phone, while bigger, contains a PalmOS device.
Some other marketroid shows off her wireless Palm device, and you demonstrate you can make phone calls on yours.
Some geek shows you that he can do email via his Blackberry, and you show him that you can ssh into his server from yours.
Some cute thing shows off that she can play silly games on her Nokia, you get her addicted to Jewelbox or something (with graphics!) on your phone.
You get into a debate about whether or not Balrogs have wings with a LoTR fan, and you can bring up the eText on your device in real time to bolster your argument.
Now, if you're a secure person, and don't need the ego strokes, you'll find that either it's a useful device because it keeps all your information together with your phone, or it's just another extraneous gadget to clutter your life, depending upon your personality.
It already exists. In a number of forms!
Backflip.com, if they're still around, did this as a service.
The Mozilla project has Bookie: http://bookie.mozdev.org/
There's also the beginnings of another shared system:
http://wwwampire.mozdev.org/
Check 'em out!
Dude, that is *so* last week!
Mozilla 1.0.1 has been out for, like, a day now. Like, upgrade already!
(Or you can make like us radical dudes, and, like, run 1.1 Beta)
It's idiom, with a meaning kinda like "manana" (Slashdot won't let me put the tilde over that first n) in Spanish. I guess the closest English equivalent would be "someday..."
(I'd be more shocked if I were to learn that someone there knew the difference between good data and bad)
And, in Mozilla, the ability to bookmark a collection of tabs is just f*king cool.
Want an entire reference library from a single bookmark?
Want to compare a bunch of arbitrary things?
Want to load up all your favorite news sites at once?
Yup. Samba.
Also NFS.
Also WebDAV.
Also has a PPTP-based VPN client.
Also has "Active Directory" compatibility, whatever that is (some Windows stuff).
And some other stuff you may have heard of, like RPC, FTP, HTTP, OpenSSH, usw.
Hewlett-wha? Perhaps you mean "HP" (soon to be known as "Compaq-Fiorina").
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu siness/companies/hewlett_packard/3282149.htm)
I'd argue that Murakami has a lot more in common with Raymond Chandler than Philip Dick.
And then, maybe Vonnegut is closer.
In any case, Murakami feels a lot less like a methanphetamine trip than PKD, and less of a bad mushroom experience than Burroughs.
Uh...
Norwegian Wood was Murakami's *first* major book, not a more recent one.
Ah yes, as they've done so dramatically in places where there is peace, like Europe and the United States.
Hardly a day goes by without another group of Jews slaughtering their brethren.
[!?]
Whenever you make a statement about what Jews believe, you're bound to be wrong, because you'll find some group of Jews who do believe the opposite.
Look up "Gehenna." It's a nasty place that (some) Jews believe the deceased go to for a period of time (up to a month; more precisely, up to the length of the period of shloshim) to be punished for sins and/or purified.
Gehenna is named for a valley near Jerusalem where the Cananites used to supposedly perform human sacrifice of children to Baal.
I'll second all of that, but the 6035 is more than basically a Palm III + Cell Phone. It's also a wireless modem and a voice note recorder.
It's also a really spiff ssh-1 wireless terminal.
It's a heck of a product. You can get 'em now for $100 with the rebate and commitment to Verizon (ack). But they've got a 700/1000 minute plan with long distance included and data calls just counting against minutes for $50/month.
At least with the most recent revisions of the ROM, they did a great job with the integration. It's all pretty natural and easy to use.
Well, I ssh into my servers from my Kyocera 6035 all the time.
When I go into places like Starbucks, people ask me "Dude, is that a phone, or a brick?" because it's bigger than their dinky little Motorolas. I laugh along with them, because by the time they get their double mocha frappaccinos, I've r00ted their box from my phone, and am tr0janizing their Outlook to send all their sensitive business plans to the competition, and their pr0n collections to their wives.
Good point.
I was thinking more about the hardware failure issue.
Sorry. To answer the questions:
How much data? I've got is about 5 GB of digital photographs / scanned negatives, 1 GB of email archives, 1 GB of various and sundry text files, 100 MB of assorted MS Office-type documents, 100 MB of source code (only about half of which is in CVS), 500 MB of web site source material (Photoshop files, HTML, etc).
How much of it do I normally need at any given site at any given time? Not much. But when I need it, I want it available.
Common accounts? Yes, when I can manage it. Unfortunately, I don't have absolute control of all the machines, so I have to have "similar" accounts on some.
Use most? Depends on the task. I tend to pretty much round-robin.
What kind of data? See above.
Backup Medium? Hard drive in a spare Debian Linux box, using rdiff-backup.
Unfortunately, much of the data I have is not sufficiently structured for an RDBMs. To be more specific, I have about 5 GB of digital photographs / scanned negatives, 1 GB of email archives, 1 GB of various and sundry text files, 100 MB of assorted MS Office-type documents, 100 MB of source code (only about half of which is in CVS), 500 MB of web site source material (Photoshop files, HTML, etc).
So I figure that the filesystem is the best database for this kind of information. But I could well be wrong!
Seems to me that either Allchin suffered some stroke or brain damage while in court, or this is all a big red herring.
...
You just don't get to Allchin's level and "accidentally" let slip something like a fundamental vulnerability in a protocol. M$ officials may make mistakes, but not like this. Not in a public forum. Not in front of a judge. Not where every news medium in the world will be covering the story.
My feeling is that this is all a distraction from something else. Every black hat on the planet is now probably checking out the Messaging protocol. My guess is that there's no smoking gun there. But maybe another protocol has problems.
Furthermore, it just doesn't make sense. An API exposes only what you want it to. It doesn't show you the vulnerabilities that exist "under the covers" unless they're titanically, apocalyptically stupid.
I'd like to know what it was that he's distracting us from
Exactly. That's why you have an immune system.
And that's why it's a good idea to eat in nasty, unsanitary, hole-in-the-wall restaurants occasionally so you can keep your immune system in a good state of practice.
OK, I'll split hairs here. The difference is that I have to pay for the spam I receive. Admittedly, as a fraction of the bandwidth I pay for, it's not huge, but I do have to pay for it. And I pay for it whether I want to receive it or not. The same is not true for porn. I would have to actively seek out porn if I wanted it (except for all the spam porn, but that's another issue entirely).
As for community standards, it's an interesting problem. Countries like China (PR) apparently have made the decision to do it by geopolitical boundaries, whereas China (ROC) don't seem to filter at all.
The issue that I find interesting is that "communities" are no longer purely geographical or ethnic entities. I could be part of communities spread across the globe, with people I have never seen or met in person, while not knowing my nextdoor neighbor.
Perhaps eventually there will be a system where, when you go online, you will need to self-select communities to which you belong. Once you're in, your access will be limited to content that is appropriate for those communities.
I'm not sure why you're so fixated on child porn.
Noone here is advocating nor supporting child porn. I'm certainly not.
The issue being discussed is whether we have a right to put otherwise perfectly legal material on the web that might be considered offensive to others. Child porn does not enter into this discussion, because it's not legal in any context.