" He won countless industry awards that year for his work and used that to launch a new career as a tech patents blogger and media expert, despite no formal training or career experience in the areas" [emphasis added]
I feel the heat of your argument, and all of them are certainly relevant in judging whether or not one should care to listen to this guy. However, you are still engaging in an ad hominem argument. Whether or not he has "formal training or career experience" is really irrelevant, as he can lack those and still be right. In fact, as a winner of "countless industry awards", perhaps he actually does have something valid to say.
The fact that he works for Oracle doesn't prove his arguments are wrong. Attacking the person, not the logic, is a well-known logical fallacy: argumentum ad hominem. All his employment provides us is some additional perspective on where he's coming from. We still need to listen to what he actually has to say.
And, by the way, EVERYBODY who works "gets paid", that doesn't make us all "biased".
1. When naming entities, pick the SAME names that the business people use when they talk about their domain. Do they call that thing you're working on an "XYZ Thingy"? Then that's the name you should give that entity in the code, formatted according to your conventions for names. Why? Because then your code aligns with the requirements, models, and documentation, no translation needed.
2. When naming methods, use GENERIC names for generic actions, or build names from combining generic action verbs with entity names, sort of the way the German language builds compound words. The entire web, for example, runs on a handful of method names, and the top three (HEAD, GET, POST) account for 99% at that.
This is actually a pretty good list, but why are you posting as AC? AC posters have no Karma. You should get credit when you post insightful things like this.
The church has historically been an early adopter of mass communication technologies, the best example being the publication of the Gutenberg Bible which marked the start of the mass-produced book printing revolution. One Bible mobile app that I think is really notable is the YouVersion app (youversion.com): multiple translations, reading plans, bookmarks, notes, social networking; it has it all. An excellent example of a learning tool.
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
If you want to optimize the accuracy of an election, you need to focus on the vast majority of races that aren't recounts. To spend all your time and effort building the perfect system for recounting is, as they say, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. People on slashdot, especially, trumpet the advantages of a paper ballot, because it can be recounted.
Let me tell you the problems with paper. Paper is not a nice medium to use to count anything. It gets torn, smudged, creased, turned around upside down and backwards, lost, and sticks to other paper. Marking is difficult, even if done with a physical machine (hanging chads) or with a scanner (in the Illinois primary, the ballots wouldn't fit into the feeder unless they were trimmed 1/16th of an inch.) Don't even talk about markings done by hand.
If you want to count something accurately, you use a computer to do it with. No one expects that if you have a spreadsheet sum 3,000 integers 10,000 times in row that you will wind up with a different answer. Do that with paper and people, and you WILL have a different answer -- lots of them.
Computers are also easier to use than paper. They have an interactive interface. They can ask the voter to confirm their vote. They can change the size of the typeface on the fly.
So, if you want the most accurate vote with the best experience, you want a computer, every time. Now, on to the hard problem: how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?
What's needed is to bring the same quality assurance controls to electronic voting machines that we do to accounting programs. Let people have their interactive GUIs, let the poor poll workers have a system that is proven to count accurately every time. This is what would optimize voting for the vast majority of races.
Highly compressed audio is hugely affected by how much background noise is present in the source audio. You want to maximize the spoken voice, and minimize everything else. This optimizes the compression algorithms by giving them the best possible data upon which to base their decisions about what gets taken out of the audio. The compression ratios are often 60:1 or higher, which means that for every 1 byte of data that gets passed on to the listener, 60 bytes are taken out. Ouch.
You must get the microphone close to the speaker. Sound pressure degrades as a square of the distance from the source, so get the mic right up close. A clip-on microphone is great because the body is partially shielding the microphone from background noise, the mic can pick up sound waves coming from from the chest as well as the mouth, and it is unobtrusive.
Do not compress to a stereo codec, a mono codec will actually sound clearer. The speaking voice has a very limited dynamic range, so you don't want the compression algorithm to devote any effort to including sounds outside that range. Using a cheap microphone can actually help in this regard, as it will not even respond to frequencies at the extended ranges.
First, the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline has increased over time, from $3.12 in 1979 to $3.58 in 2012. Second, the production of gasoline has decreased over time, from 255,185 barrels in 1979 to 168,287 in 2012. There are lots of ups and downs between these two numbers, but the trend line is pretty clear even to the naked eye. So, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. Maybe the reason the price hasn't gone down is because the supply has become more scarce.
As a part-time musician who would love to be full-time, it takes all my free time to hone my craft and keep developing new material. I'm not that good at marketing, setting up tours (a monumental task), or even keeping up with fans via the Internet, frankly. I would gladly pay for people who ARE good at these things, which is supposedly what a major label would bring to the table. But as Paul McCartney discovered, the labels really don't have any good ideas about how to engage an Internet-fueled fan base -- even if you give them millions of dollars to work with.
The change that needs to happen is for the labels to recast themselves as fee-for-service organizations, instead of vertically-integrated companies that own everything in the food chain. Vertical integration only works if you completely control ALL the supply chain. The Internet has effectively thrown that business model onto the ash heap, but we musicians still need the services that labels can provide.
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android What makes this different is that your phone automatically shifts between ubuntu and android versions of the same apps, based on whether or not your phone is docked. All your data is stored in the same place (on your phone and in the cloud). It's a great insight: the UI one develops for a small form-factor really needs to be different from a large form-factor. But that difference doesn't mean you have to use completely different apps, and it certainly doesn't mean your data should be in two different places.
I thought so too, until I saw a Metro UI with real data. Then, those "empty" tiles become mini-dashboards of continuously-updated information. The flat presentation style is actually a benefit: just enough organization to hold things together, not too much to get in the way of quickly scanning the tiles for updates.
It is the only protocol with these important properties.
That is incorrect. I am a poll worker in Virginia, and we follow a very similar protocol for our DRE voting machines. We run the machines through a double-blind test prior to the vote, under the observation of multiple parties, and then we seal them. During the vote, the machines are kept in the open and observed by multiple parties. Each hour, the total votes cast are compared to the total voters allowed into the polling place, and the results called in my phone, and independently recorded, by the Registrar. At the end of the voting day, the vote totals are printed on paper, called into the Registrar by phone, and then aggregated by the State Board of Election. We then transfer the totals in ink onto a separate report, make a backup copy of the database, seal our report and the machines, and deliver them to the Registrar. The sealed reports and backup data go to the local courthouse, where they are locked away until the vote is certified.
In order to defeat our system, you would have to do it in the open, under the (very) watchful gaze of multiple parties both partisan and neutral, and you would have to do it in a way that did not change the total number of votes cast. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be really, really hard.
I have been volunteering for many years, know a thing or two about machine security, and am very confident that we run a clean, fair, and open election with results that are far better than a paper ballot count. If I had a choice between a paper and a machine/electronic balloting process, I would never choose to use paper. Paper is an awful medium for counting. You may have noticed that places where counting is important -- like banks -- paper is no longer used. There's a reason for that!
I think it's a bit unfair to call the Fire a beta product. My experience was It met all my expectations almost flawlessly. I can't remember the last time a version 1.0 product worked so well, honestly. The device is a pleasure to use, and it has become my "network" reading device of choice.
The only feature to disappoint was the Silk browser, which was more sluggish than silky. I've settled on Opera for now, but neither Opera nor Silk have the one plugin I really want: ad blocking. Fortunately, Opera lets me disable Flash, which gives the Fire just enough CPU headroom to load pages with acceptable speed.
The report says that attacking browsers (yes, browsers, not PCs) were all targeted at the same URL with a few randomized URL values thrown in to force the server to treat them as separate requests. The key to defeating a DDOS, as I understand it, is to be able to separate legal requests from illegal, and route them to different places. If every attacker attacks with almost the exact same URL signature, doesn't that make it trivially easy to defeat? Am I missing something?
Some companies propose, in order to support DRM, locking up computers so they can only only run “approved” operating systems; that might bother ordinary users less than those other treacheries, but to us would be utterly intolerable. If you imagine a sculptor told that his new chisel would only cut shapes pre-approved by a committee of shape vendors, you might begin to fathom the depths of our anger at these proposals.
His description of "approved" operating systems is too broad. Signing code itself is not a problem, in fact it's a blessing when used properly. The key to proper use is deciding who holds the signing keys. The consumer who owns the device needs to be in charge of that device; he or she must be able to decide whether or not unsigned code is allowed to run. If the user chooses to run only signed code, I think it perfectly fine to let manufacturers implement this as they wish. This could be extended to several layers: the hardware, the boot OS, the user OS, etc. Each of these could be secured, with the user's permission, by the corresponding manufacturer/distributor.
This certainly wouldn't prevent developers from "cutting" any shape they wanted with their code. But they would have to participate in some share system of security. That doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to me, and fundamentally a good idea, to boot.
The trailer's worth the visit just to hear Orson Welles say, "Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud; about... lies."
If it takes 64KB to communicate link navigation request using voice input, and ~1KB to do the same with a hyperlink, then yeah, that will have a pretty big impact on data usage. Of course, if you're shelling out up to $400 just for a phone, you probably don't care about the data cost.
From TFA, the passer-by went to the community center and complained, who reacted by calling the police. That makes little sense. Why didn't they just mutter, "oooh, those kids!" and call IT to change the access point config? Speaking of which, presuming this wasn't done by an IT staffer, how in the world was someone else able to hack in and change the name? What, no password?
The problem with hate speech laws is they are focused on the wrong end of the stick: the words, not the hatred itself. If you forbid the speech, it drives the hateful thoughts underground, and makes it harder for us to know that it exists. By allowing the speech, we let the thoughts come to the surface, where the rest of society can react to it and respond with their counter-arguments.
Drew Huston wants his service to become the Internet's file system. What would that look like? A lot of the features you'd want are already in Dropbox: cloud storage, privacy (at least from other users), 30-day versioning, and de-duplication. What's missing are APIs to get to your content without the clumsy requirement to sync locally first. That'd be something.
The WWII version was the Military-Industrial Complex, and President Eisenhower had some pretty choice words to say about it. A brief excerpt:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
I hope you spoil your ballot by casting an undervote (i.e., not selecting any of the candidates), and not by defacing or harming the ballot in any way, which creates a lot more work for us poll workers. Undervotes are usually reported right alongside the normal votes, too, so you'll get a tally after the vote, just like a regular candidate. YMMV as each State has different rules.
Slashdot Mirror
" He won countless industry awards that year for his work and used that to launch a new career as a tech patents blogger and media expert, despite no formal training or career experience in the areas"
[emphasis added]
I feel the heat of your argument, and all of them are certainly relevant in judging whether or not one should care to listen to this guy. However, you are still engaging in an ad hominem argument. Whether or not he has "formal training or career experience" is really irrelevant, as he can lack those and still be right. In fact, as a winner of "countless industry awards", perhaps he actually does have something valid to say.
The fact that he works for Oracle doesn't prove his arguments are wrong. Attacking the person, not the logic, is a well-known logical fallacy: argumentum ad hominem. All his employment provides us is some additional perspective on where he's coming from. We still need to listen to what he actually has to say.
And, by the way, EVERYBODY who works "gets paid", that doesn't make us all "biased".
Even better:
1. When naming entities, pick the SAME names that the business people use when they talk about their domain. Do they call that thing you're working on an "XYZ Thingy"? Then that's the name you should give that entity in the code, formatted according to your conventions for names. Why? Because then your code aligns with the requirements, models, and documentation, no translation needed.
2. When naming methods, use GENERIC names for generic actions, or build names from combining generic action verbs with entity names, sort of the way the German language builds compound words. The entire web, for example, runs on a handful of method names, and the top three (HEAD, GET, POST) account for 99% at that.
This is the domain-driven design way to do it.
This is actually a pretty good list, but why are you posting as AC? AC posters have no Karma. You should get credit when you post insightful things like this.
The church has historically been an early adopter of mass communication technologies, the best example being the publication of the Gutenberg Bible which marked the start of the mass-produced book printing revolution. One Bible mobile app that I think is really notable is the YouVersion app (youversion.com): multiple translations, reading plans, bookmarks, notes, social networking; it has it all. An excellent example of a learning tool.
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
If you want to optimize the accuracy of an election, you need to focus on the vast majority of races that aren't recounts. To spend all your time and effort building the perfect system for recounting is, as they say, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. People on slashdot, especially, trumpet the advantages of a paper ballot, because it can be recounted.
Let me tell you the problems with paper. Paper is not a nice medium to use to count anything. It gets torn, smudged, creased, turned around upside down and backwards, lost, and sticks to other paper. Marking is difficult, even if done with a physical machine (hanging chads) or with a scanner (in the Illinois primary, the ballots wouldn't fit into the feeder unless they were trimmed 1/16th of an inch.) Don't even talk about markings done by hand.
If you want to count something accurately, you use a computer to do it with. No one expects that if you have a spreadsheet sum 3,000 integers 10,000 times in row that you will wind up with a different answer. Do that with paper and people, and you WILL have a different answer -- lots of them.
Computers are also easier to use than paper. They have an interactive interface. They can ask the voter to confirm their vote. They can change the size of the typeface on the fly.
So, if you want the most accurate vote with the best experience, you want a computer, every time. Now, on to the hard problem: how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?
What's needed is to bring the same quality assurance controls to electronic voting machines that we do to accounting programs. Let people have their interactive GUIs, let the poor poll workers have a system that is proven to count accurately every time. This is what would optimize voting for the vast majority of races.
Highly compressed audio is hugely affected by how much background noise is present in the source audio. You want to maximize the spoken voice, and minimize everything else. This optimizes the compression algorithms by giving them the best possible data upon which to base their decisions about what gets taken out of the audio. The compression ratios are often 60:1 or higher, which means that for every 1 byte of data that gets passed on to the listener, 60 bytes are taken out. Ouch.
You must get the microphone close to the speaker. Sound pressure degrades as a square of the distance from the source, so get the mic right up close. A clip-on microphone is great because the body is partially shielding the microphone from background noise, the mic can pick up sound waves coming from from the chest as well as the mouth, and it is unobtrusive.
Do not compress to a stereo codec, a mono codec will actually sound clearer. The speaking voice has a very limited dynamic range, so you don't want the compression algorithm to devote any effort to including sounds outside that range. Using a cheap microphone can actually help in this regard, as it will not even respond to frequencies at the extended ranges.
First, the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline has increased over time, from $3.12 in 1979 to $3.58 in 2012. Second, the production of gasoline has decreased over time, from 255,185 barrels in 1979 to 168,287 in 2012. There are lots of ups and downs between these two numbers, but the trend line is pretty clear even to the naked eye. So, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. Maybe the reason the price hasn't gone down is because the supply has become more scarce.
As a part-time musician who would love to be full-time, it takes all my free time to hone my craft and keep developing new material. I'm not that good at marketing, setting up tours (a monumental task), or even keeping up with fans via the Internet, frankly. I would gladly pay for people who ARE good at these things, which is supposedly what a major label would bring to the table. But as Paul McCartney discovered, the labels really don't have any good ideas about how to engage an Internet-fueled fan base -- even if you give them millions of dollars to work with.
The change that needs to happen is for the labels to recast themselves as fee-for-service organizations, instead of vertically-integrated companies that own everything in the food chain. Vertical integration only works if you completely control ALL the supply chain. The Internet has effectively thrown that business model onto the ash heap, but we musicians still need the services that labels can provide.
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android What makes this different is that your phone automatically shifts between ubuntu and android versions of the same apps, based on whether or not your phone is docked. All your data is stored in the same place (on your phone and in the cloud). It's a great insight: the UI one develops for a small form-factor really needs to be different from a large form-factor. But that difference doesn't mean you have to use completely different apps, and it certainly doesn't mean your data should be in two different places.
I thought so too, until I saw a Metro UI with real data. Then, those "empty" tiles become mini-dashboards of continuously-updated information. The flat presentation style is actually a benefit: just enough organization to hold things together, not too much to get in the way of quickly scanning the tiles for updates.
Kindle Fire
That is incorrect. I am a poll worker in Virginia, and we follow a very similar protocol for our DRE voting machines. We run the machines through a double-blind test prior to the vote, under the observation of multiple parties, and then we seal them. During the vote, the machines are kept in the open and observed by multiple parties. Each hour, the total votes cast are compared to the total voters allowed into the polling place, and the results called in my phone, and independently recorded, by the Registrar. At the end of the voting day, the vote totals are printed on paper, called into the Registrar by phone, and then aggregated by the State Board of Election. We then transfer the totals in ink onto a separate report, make a backup copy of the database, seal our report and the machines, and deliver them to the Registrar. The sealed reports and backup data go to the local courthouse, where they are locked away until the vote is certified.
In order to defeat our system, you would have to do it in the open, under the (very) watchful gaze of multiple parties both partisan and neutral, and you would have to do it in a way that did not change the total number of votes cast. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be really, really hard.
I have been volunteering for many years, know a thing or two about machine security, and am very confident that we run a clean, fair, and open election with results that are far better than a paper ballot count. If I had a choice between a paper and a machine/electronic balloting process, I would never choose to use paper. Paper is an awful medium for counting. You may have noticed that places where counting is important -- like banks -- paper is no longer used. There's a reason for that!
I think it's a bit unfair to call the Fire a beta product. My experience was It met all my expectations almost flawlessly. I can't remember the last time a version 1.0 product worked so well, honestly. The device is a pleasure to use, and it has become my "network" reading device of choice.
The only feature to disappoint was the Silk browser, which was more sluggish than silky. I've settled on Opera for now, but neither Opera nor Silk have the one plugin I really want: ad blocking. Fortunately, Opera lets me disable Flash, which gives the Fire just enough CPU headroom to load pages with acceptable speed.
The report says that attacking browsers (yes, browsers, not PCs) were all targeted at the same URL with a few randomized URL values thrown in to force the server to treat them as separate requests. The key to defeating a DDOS, as I understand it, is to be able to separate legal requests from illegal, and route them to different places. If every attacker attacks with almost the exact same URL signature, doesn't that make it trivially easy to defeat? Am I missing something?
From the letter,
His description of "approved" operating systems is too broad. Signing code itself is not a problem, in fact it's a blessing when used properly. The key to proper use is deciding who holds the signing keys. The consumer who owns the device needs to be in charge of that device; he or she must be able to decide whether or not unsigned code is allowed to run. If the user chooses to run only signed code, I think it perfectly fine to let manufacturers implement this as they wish. This could be extended to several layers: the hardware, the boot OS, the user OS, etc. Each of these could be secured, with the user's permission, by the corresponding manufacturer/distributor.
This certainly wouldn't prevent developers from "cutting" any shape they wanted with their code. But they would have to participate in some share system of security. That doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to me, and fundamentally a good idea, to boot.
The trailer's worth the visit just to hear Orson Welles say, "Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud; about ... lies."
I see what you've done there: you've taken an argument for privacy, and made it equivalent to an argument against freedom of speech.
If it takes 64KB to communicate link navigation request using voice input, and ~1KB to do the same with a hyperlink, then yeah, that will have a pretty big impact on data usage. Of course, if you're shelling out up to $400 just for a phone, you probably don't care about the data cost.
From TFA, the passer-by went to the community center and complained, who reacted by calling the police. That makes little sense. Why didn't they just mutter, "oooh, those kids!" and call IT to change the access point config? Speaking of which, presuming this wasn't done by an IT staffer, how in the world was someone else able to hack in and change the name? What, no password?
The problem with hate speech laws is they are focused on the wrong end of the stick: the words, not the hatred itself. If you forbid the speech, it drives the hateful thoughts underground, and makes it harder for us to know that it exists. By allowing the speech, we let the thoughts come to the surface, where the rest of society can react to it and respond with their counter-arguments.
Free speech is the API of an open, civil society.
Drew Huston wants his service to become the Internet's file system. What would that look like? A lot of the features you'd want are already in Dropbox: cloud storage, privacy (at least from other users), 30-day versioning, and de-duplication. What's missing are APIs to get to your content without the clumsy requirement to sync locally first. That'd be something.
IEEE-USA's analysis is http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/eyeonwashington/2011/documents/IPprotectAct.pdf
The WWII version was the Military-Industrial Complex, and President Eisenhower had some pretty choice words to say about it. A brief excerpt:
I hope you spoil your ballot by casting an undervote (i.e., not selecting any of the candidates), and not by defacing or harming the ballot in any way, which creates a lot more work for us poll workers. Undervotes are usually reported right alongside the normal votes, too, so you'll get a tally after the vote, just like a regular candidate. YMMV as each State has different rules.