Medical researchers who would like to know the demographics of an area and how they affect various
health issues Demographers who research race/ethnicity and a whole host of things
Yes. Yes, they would. And I would like a flying unicorn that farts rainbows.
Too bad Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution doesn't allow collecting that
information - Or anything except for number of residents, and that established legal
precedent (since 1894, and never reversed) expressly forbids the government collecting
anything else under the guise of the "census".
i could go on, but you've clearly got an axe to grind.
Damned straight we do! The US government has repeatedly shown itself incapable of
responsibly carrying out its duty to enumerate (and nothing more) the citizens for the
sole purpose of apportioning our representatives.
If the government had historically refrained from abusing its power, we might have a
different conversation here; as it stands - I answered question #1 with "2", and left the
rest blank.
Oh, and those scaaaaary spooooky fines? They haven't issued a census-related fine since 1970, when
a Hawaiian man challenged his $50 fine in court - And won.
Why yes, thank you, I would like fries with that webpage.
This topic simply amazes me every time it comes up... Yes, you most certainly need
decent math skills to work as a halfway decent programmer. No, every line of
code you write won't require solving PDEs, but you will use, at a minimum, algebra,
geometry/trig, and combinatorics (whether you know it or not) on a daily basis. And on
the DB side, you'd damned well better know set theory inside and out.
Most code you write in the real world, in my experience, involves page after page of conditionals.
No one "enjoys" that part of the job, we do it to cover our asses against the myriad crap users will
try to force-feed a program. But after 500 lines of checking that nothing can possibly go wrong,
at some point you need to do something with all that information. You need to plot sales
trends, or minimize cost functions over several independent variables, or turn a list of options
into a manufacturing-floor ready bill-of-materials (don't ever say "BOM" in an airport - I know
this from personal experience) for a 747, or track a missile moving in 3d space toward the game's hero.
Yes, you can find formulas with Google. And if you don't have a solid background in math, you will
misuse them (or fail to realize a far, far easier and more efficient solution exists).
So, in short, the paperless office is waiting on bigger displays.
For most of the reasons I use paper, an 8.5x11in 300dpi "tablet" (with a battery life long enough not to annoy
me) would work just wonderfully.
Even then, though, I would still continue to leave "sticky" notes to myself on paper. For example, one of my favorite
tricks made possible by nice thin LCD panels involves taking an index card, making two folds in it, and BAM,
instant persistent note that sits neatly in the top "margin" of my screen. And best of all, it has four sides (six,
actually, but using the middle part misses the point) I can use to recycle it.
When I can do that without using paper and for a yearly expense of under $0.49, we can talk.
Now, that said, it does very much annoy me when people explicitly print out a document so I can have a hardcopy. Just
email me the damned thing and save a forest. This seems like a generational thing, IMO - Younger people just want the PDF,
with all its glorious searchability, while older ones complain about things like font sizes and the "eye strain" of an
illuminated background.
A working 586? C'mon, not exactly modern, but not really ancient, either. Also zero chance of your
box containing "one of the first" BBSs... For reference, Compuserve went live in 1969 - Six years before
even the legendary Altair 8800, 17 years before Western Digital developed the IDE standard, and a good 24+
years before Intel released the CPU in Altos to which you refer.
I do find a 10MB HDD in a 586 somewhat strange, though... Yes, they certainly did exist, but it would have counted
as an antique even back then. By the time I had a 586 (1994, they debuted in 1993), you could already get
drives measured in gigabytes, and most people ran drives in the high-3-digit megabytes.
Others, however, have already given you your answer. Dump the whole FS over the serial link. Don't bother screwing
around with trying to get it running in a modern box, just get what you want off it while it still works in its
current form.
Huh? I doubt in the extreme that the DOD has gone to war with the CIA, or that they are this blatantly making
like the Keystone Kops.
I know, right? Because, y'know, not like we had enough information to absolutely stop 9/11 from happening if only
TweedleDee had shared his pie with TweedleDum...
I have a reasonably high level of confidence that either agency has their shit reasonably together. I have
zero confidence that two organizations, both of whom encourage extreme distrust of everyone outside their
own hierarchy, have any ability whatsoever to work cooperatively toward ording lunch, much less decreasing
international terrorism.
You want my personal take on this? (Well, I'll give it anyway):
The CIA had this really great program that gave them a golden "in" with their targets.
The NSA said "Hey, cool idea, can we play too?"
"Nuh-uh"
"Pleeeeeease?"
"Nope"
"Well screw you guys, you goin' down!".
"Bring it!"
And as a result, two intelligence agencies will now produce significantly less information
than either one could have alone.
Yes; In fact, I'm going to walk out on shaky ice and claim that every program [...snip...]
uses more than one byte!
FTFY. Every program uses at least one full page of memory. Modern CPUs and OS-level memory management don't allow anything less.
So, thus far, some people have seen this as a "who watches the watcher" problem, some describe it as a white/blacklisting
problem (though as far as I can see, he only appears to refer to blacklisting, not sure where people got the
whitelisting idea from), some discuss the possibility of malware injecting itself into something else's address space, and
still others complain that the malware could just let itself get swapped out like any other
program.
For the sake of argument, lets assume that his explicitly listed premises all hold true, and that he has an infallable, uncrackable
watcher.
His suggested means of detection still has one glaring problem that directly contradicts his conclusion:
"Two: not be active in RAM, but store itself in secondary storage. It cannot interfere with the detection algorithm then, quite obviously".
and...
"We can guarantee detection of malware. And that includes zero-day attacks and rootkits."
Now the problem (which others have mentioned, but none have taken the leap to why this breaks his method) - If this hypothetical
malware does try to hide itself, his approach will detect it. If it doesn't try to hide, his approach reverts back to offline
scanning of secondary storage - Which has a flaw which he explains right in his introduction:
"Anti-virus products scan for malware in two ways. They look for sequences of bits that are found in programs that are known
to be bad (but which are not commonly found in good programs). And they run programs in sandboxes and look for known malicious
actions. The first approach only catches known malware instances, while the second can also catch variants of these."
Thus, no zero-day detection for anything that doesn't try to hide.
Bah. Humbug! Bullsh*t. 64K ought to be enough for anybody surfing the web
Okay, joking aside, I have to ask how that works in practice - Even ignoring images, I've seen more than a few web pages
where they HTML itself weighs in at more than 64k. Does it reload the page every time you scroll, throwing away everything
up to (and after) your current position?
At some point, you have to take someone's word that the software you are loading on
your computer is "trustworthy", unless you're going to write it all yourself.
Yes and no.
Yes, I don't personally audit every line of code I run on my computers, so in that sense I "trust"
the FOSS community to act as a pretty damned effective first-line defense against most of the common
crap commercial vendors try to pull (whether Sony rootkits or WGA or Energizer's recent scandal).
But also "No", in that if I notice some suspicious activity in a program I use, I can
have the relevant source open in front of me five minutes later to see why it did what
it did - Did it just get confused by a DNS timeout? Did it legitimately (it not
necessarily with my permission) try to update itself to handle my request? Did it try to report
everything I've done in the past 24 hours to a remote server in China under the guise of
a "bug report"? With commercial software, I can at best block its action at the firewall
and see what breaks; With FOSS, I can know what it did and act accordingly.
Free software isn't inherently more trustworthy, it simply moves the trust
relationship around.
Yep, it does. And I'll trust a million strangers with no commercial interest in my
life over a single CEO who sees me as a "resource" any day of the week, thankyouverymuch.
And as a side-bonus, it also places more of that burden of trust right back on my shoulders.
And while I may not always act in my own best interest, I do unwaveringly trust myself.
Can't speak for these in particular, but usually hollow coins start life as real coins.
The cheap ones, they just cut in half, gouge out a little pocket, and add a concealed hinge/pivot.
The nicer ones actually unscrew and look almost like a very tiny pill bottle.
And I suppose, for the same reason those penny-squishing trinket-makers don't break the law, neither
do these.
All released products have a spec sheet. The differences are form factor, frequency,
radio power, antenna options and computing power.
True, and I'll credit them as giving more detailed product info than many companies - Except
sometimes that information really doesn't help without knowing their baseline performance (ie, to me
as a potential new customer). You mention radio power and CPU/memory, which I can see clearly on
their spec sheets - But that doesn't really translate readily into "if you have LOS with a standard
rubber duck (just as a point of reference, of course), you can serve X CPEs up to Y meters away"...
Just some minimal level of service that I can work from.
If you have questions, try the forums
Done, and they have indeed helped me greatly.:)
I don't know what is so special about Aironet APs, can you explain why they might
be favorable to anything else?
Honestly, I don't know why they work so well... But I've seen a good number of
installations where, whether due to background RF or walls or just distance, a variety
of other APs (including some supposedly high-end ones, but still only talking about SoHo products
here - I've never had the privilege of working with the likes of Xirrus gear)
gave poor to marginal performance (constant drop-offs, extremely low
throughput, etc), and throwing in an Aironet with the exact same config worked like a charm.
Perhaps they just have really high quality radios, perhaps they cheat and put out a hair
more power than stated, I really don't know. But I've never had a complaint about them
(other than that I do not consider myself a fan of IOS). I've gotten "lazy" to the point
that I consider them almost a magic bullet in many single-AP situations - Someone wants me to
fix a spotty (or often they use more "colorful" words) WiFi installation, I drop in an Aironet,
and call it good for 15 minutes' work.
I actually had a "problem" with a pair of them once (both with 12(?)db omnis), where I didn't
happen to know the SSIDs off the top of my head and had full signal-strength to both; I connected
to the wrong one, over 100m away and through the walls of two all-steel-construction buildings.
That right there just blew me away with respect for their performance.
That said, if you need more than one or two, the cost adds up fast - As others in this topic
have pointed out, you can buy 10-15 WRT54GLs for the price of one 1142... So unless you literally
need a drop-in fix - Well, I asked about Ubiquitis for a reason.;)
One other note- if you want to play with it you're only our less than $100, which is nothing.
At least you get a radio with open software that you can use for anything.
Thinking I'll do exactly that. I'll pick up a bullet or three (which seems like their lowest common
denominator, so I can always upgrade from there if needed) and see what they can do.
When will someone come out with a viable competitor for PayPal so that we will finally have a choice?
A viable alternative already exists - Just use your bank as a CC payment processor.
My father runs a small business (under half a million gross per year), and about two years ago discovered that his
bank would handle everything for a quite reasonable fee - About the same as he previously paid just to take Visa,
and, as a bonus, he can accept the dreaded American Express (as well as just about any major CC) that so many
small businesses refuse to touch (meaning he can accept corporate and government business, which tend to use AmEx
almost exclusively).
If you expect mostly a lot of very small transactions (such as a typical web site "tip" jar), that model might not work
so well. But if you sell anything best measured in "dollars" rather than "cents", it seems like a no-brainer.
Or just use Picostations, which is a bullet with an RP-SMA instead of an N type and a built in omni. But really
with many users it seems like Rocket+Sector Antennas is the way to go, yeah?
Hey there... I have a vaguely similar project (a campground, more spread out users and outside, and I plan to use
ChilliSpot in UAM from a dedicated Chilli/Radius/Squid backend server) coming up in a few months, and I see a lot
of people swearing by Ubiqiti (particularly their Rockets), and certainly can't complain about the price...
I have to wonder, though... The FP specifically mentioned Aironets, and considering the price of their more modern
versions (like the 1142), how does the Rocket M5 at under $100 compare favorably to an Aironet 1142 for $800?
Just the "premium" nature of paying for Cisco gear, or does this reflect the more common situation where
the Ubiqiti can pull 90% of the load for 10% of the price?
Also, I've seen mention of Bullets, Rockets, and Nano/PicoStations, and the product information on Ubiqiti's
website does a piss-poor job of really differentiating them. Do those all act as standalone APs, or do some act
as only radios and need a separate controller? Also, the Rocket (which a number of people have suggested by name)
looks more like they intend it as a wireless bridge rather than an AP... The AirOS screenshots make it look like
all of these can act in pretty much any common mode (station, AP, bridge, repeater), but does that really apply
to all their products or would, say, a PicoStation only support AP or station mode while a Rocket only
supports bridging?
As an IT Director (who came up through a 17 year career as an IT support person), I'm increasingly
frustrated by IT admins who just don't see the big picture.
Except, who here has really missed the big picture?
Great, you have absolute control over your users desktop environments, every program they can run, and every web site
they can get to. To what end? Boosting sales of iPhones?
Your admins fight with you because they know things you don't. You users will just move on to the easiest way to get
what they want done, whether for work or recreation. At most companies, this has little consequence; At a hospital,
it means that because you didn't want to deal with FireFox, you have confidential patient information sitting on Yahoo's
servers in plaintext emails. Congrats, you have a bigger dick than your admins, see you in court.
The phishing messages often include instructions for opening up mail servers to enable spam relaying, to disable
their host-based firewalls, and to open up unprotected network shares.
Why on Earth would I do that at the whim of my ISP or web host? I've actually gotten into arguments with known, real
providers that insisted they needed access to my network to work properly (correct response - "No, no you don't - and neither does
your competition"), I sure as hell wouldn't say "Oh, you have a new service? Cool, guess I'll chuck that Sonicwall in the trash
now...".
This may target "your nephew who does your computer stuff at the office", but it sure as hell doesn't target IT professionals.
In this case, Ticketmaster counts as the asshole buying all the flour and selling it at a markup - And by explicit collusion
with the original seller, no less, an arrangement that in most contexts would count as illegal.
Wiseguy simply found a way to trick the asshole into selling them a significant portion of the flour at $5, so
they could then resell it for $6.
Personally, I fall on the "what crime?" side of this story, for one reason (unrelated to the BS about the captchas
and the legally paid for botnet) - Ticketmaster just won their own ticket diversion case where they
basically did the exact same thing as Wiseguy, except by selling to themselves, they didn't need to worry about silly
little risks like competing with the public for prime tickets, they could just reserve them before sales even started.
That said, all of these clowns need 255 grains of lead administered transcranially. It amazes me that more of
the actual performers don't take a stand (they don't get more money my the tickets passing through 27 middlemen,
each tacking on their own fees) and say "if you do this, we won't play".
If you'd RTFA (I know This Is Slashdot) you'd have read that:
Believe it or not, some of us already knew the context of this issue and brought in information from
other sources. For example:
In Texas, five parents filed a lawsuit through the
Texas Civil Rights Project on March 12, 2009. Texas settled their lawsuit by agreeing to destroy
blood spots collected without parent consent since 2002 (all blood spots before a May 27, 2009
opt-out bill became law), but keeping the genetic test results indefinitely. The new law allows
retention of newborn blood spots (DNA) unless parents sign a form either the day of the screening
when they receive the form or any time in the future.
So basically, yeah, they destroyed the original blood samples. And you can opt out of them keeping such
samples in the future. But they will keep the DNA they already have, and they will collect
the blood and keep the DNA from it in the future.
How, exactly, are anonymized blood samples going to used to track down missing persons or solve cold cases,
or do anything else that hinges on tying a person to that blood sample?
TFA actually refers to two separate programs.
The first, and more chilling of the two, Texas hospitals have sent all newborn blood samples for
entry into a DNA database since 2003. The second part, which came to light only because of the suit by parents over the first point,
involves 800 anonymous samples for an mtDNA database. That part sounds reasonably innocuous
(if still lacking in prior consent).
So, how "should" we feel about this? We should feel pretty damned pissed, and each and every one of us
should flood our states, towns, and local hospitals with FOIA requests about possible variants of similar
programs in our own areas. We should also (but of course won't) riot in the streets demanding the immediate destruction
of this database and all samples taken, as well as a goddamned constitutional amendment explicitly granting
us "genetic privacy" rights from both government and private (aka commercial) entities.
Instead, this will just fade from view without anyone really noticing or caring, and will expand until it contains each
and every human in the country (and eventually, on the planet). And we'll still fail
to stop illegal immigration or terrorist attacks, but you can bet your last penny it'll affect your ability
to get loans and various types of insurance.
"Oh, sorry, your Genetic Rating (tm) says you probably won't live long enough to pay us back, can't help you with that new car".
I think users would like computers to ignore error conditions until they're done with all input related
to performing an operation, for starters.
Absolutely, positively wrong. I don't mean that caustically - I see your idea, and consider it good in theory,
but I can tell you from first-hand experience exactly what this leads to in practice:
"Hey, you the jackass that wrote this thing? Yeah, I just spent an hour putting in a quote for a customer
standing in front of me, and now it tells me it can't connect to your server?"
At that point, give them a friendly error telling them the printer seems to be disconnected, and their
print job will complete automatically, once they re-attach it.
Continuing with the previous example, the error message in question explicitly tells the user
that it will just save a local copy (which they can print and otherwise work with as normal) until
it can reconnect to the server. But no one actually reads that far.
At least if the program tells them it can't get to the server (and will save locally instead) right up
front, you don't have to pretend to feel bad that they wasted an hour.
And yes, I've just described a real example (complete with me answering the phone to hear "hey jackass!").
There's lots of problems where there's no licensing board to pass, but for which the solution is important.
Agreed. This doesn't fall into that category, however.
Then again, call me crazy, but I have no problem with having MSIE as the default, as long as you can replace
it as the default and (if so desired) remove it fully from your system. Even if I never use it again, if nothing else
it means that the second I finish an installation, I can grab updates manually.
Now, if you want to discuss Windows Media Player, I'll fall more on your side of the issue. I loathe that bloated piece
of spyware that breaks all my associations every time I try to play some new file extension that I haven't yet bound to VLC.:)
2) General geek pedantry. Many geeks seem to love to be exceedingly pedantic about every little thing. If a definition isn't 100% perfect, at least in their mind, they jump all over it. I think it is a "Look at how smart I am!" kind of move. They want to show that they noticed that it wasn't 100% perfect and thus show how clever they are.
First of all, let me say that I fall in on Microsoft's side on this one - So they didn't use a shuffle that would
pass muster for a licensed video poker system - So what? Totally irrelevant, they satisfied the obligation to
randomize the list, end of story.
However, as to your comment about geek pedantry - I often get accused of doing exactly what you say, and can
say comfortably that I don't do it to "look smart". I do it because if you bother defining a term,
then immediately contradict yourself, we have a real problem. To a lesser degree, if you use a normally
well-defined term incorrectly, then again, we have a problem.
I think geeks pick nits about such matters more for clarity than for self gratification. And I defend that
stance by the fact that I demand similar precision from myself... If, in a conversation, I start down
a path that leads to a contradiction, I will apologize, see if my intended point still holds despite the
misstart, and proceed from there.
The fact that this habit tends to annoy others, I attribute to the fact that, in
demanding such rigor from ourselves, we get fairly good at not making such errors all that often - Thus we seem
to pick nits about others, but not ourselves.
Look, I'm just explaining how banks work. If you have an online business, you
need a real world address and telephone number on your site.
What if you have an offline business?
Plenty of posts so far have gone back and forth between "he said she said" and "compliance yadda
yadda yadda". But it seems no one has actually pointed out how this relates to the "real"
world.
I can go down to my bank tomorrow and get a small business checking account with zero
"compliance" checks involved (other than proof that I really exist). I can, at the same time (for
a monthly plus various per-use fees), sign up to have my bank act as a payment processor so I
can accept credit cards from my hypothetical customers.
I conspicuously don't need a website to do any of that. I don't need to put up a sign
in front of my business with contact info; I don't need to prove that I have a listing in the phone
book; I don't need to demonstrate that I have an advertising budget to make the world aware of me.
They simply don't care. I have an account, they hold my money for me. Simple as that.
The bank needs to know that your customers will have a way to contact you in the real world to
resolve disputes, otherwise the bank fears it will have to eat the costs of said disputes.
In what universe do banks ever eat the cost of disputes? Okay, they may have some overhead for
dealing with disputes (and even that usually gets passed on to their direct customer), but
in the end they pick who owes what and call it good. "Eating it" never even enters their consideration.
Intensive math training = Knowing that n^2 grows faster than n * log(n)?
No. You need the math background to understand why/how a given algorithm performs in
O(n log(n)) rather than O(n^2). You need math to know when your O(n log(n)) actually degrades
to O(n^2) (quicksort, as the classic example, does this in the worst case). You need math to
know when to deliberately use an O(n^2) algorithm over an O(n log(n)) (again with
quicksort, it has enough overhead that for sorting a few dozen items, you'll do it faster
with a good ol' fashioned O(n^2) bubble sort. Not every algorithm you'll ever use comes in
cookbook-form complete with a pre-calculated description of its worst/mean/best case efficiency.
You need math to understand when your algorithm exhibits stability, and when it trends off to +/-
infinity. When it gives meaningless but apparently reasonable answers. When you can extend it to
related systems (complex or multivariate cases, for example). Why some phrasings of an equation
work in code and others fail miserable (arctangent as a good, if simplistic, example). When your
hash function counts as secure vs good enough (MD5 no longer counts as "secure", but it still
works 100% as good as ever in situations where "deliberate attack" doesn't apply). When you
can deterministically optimize a system of equations, or can safely use a gradient descent method,
or need to resort to simulated annealing (or similar local-minima avoiding techniques)
Finally, after analyzing dozens or hundreds of common algorithms, you will at the very least
know of them and when to use them. When a well-known (in CS circles) problem comes up on a
job, you won't spend two months trying either to reinvent the wheel or to squeeze Shuttle
Crawler tires on a Vespa. This alone, regardless of your ability to actually create or analyze
new algorithms, often means the difference between a hack and a good programmer.
So yes, I will agree with several other posters here - The difference between a self-taught
programmer and a university trained one comes down to a single resounding answer, "Math".
And one more thing.. what's the big deal about teaching people hexadecimal? What's the purpose?
I could give a lot of answers to this, but one seems entirely too fitting to the topic - Because it lets
you instantly see when an O(n log(n)) algorithm will suddenly take twice as long as the same algorithm
on n-1.
Slashdot Mirror
Medical researchers who would like to know the demographics of an area and how they affect various health issues Demographers who research race/ethnicity and a whole host of things
Yes. Yes, they would. And I would like a flying unicorn that farts rainbows.
Too bad Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution doesn't allow collecting that information - Or anything except for number of residents, and that established legal precedent (since 1894, and never reversed) expressly forbids the government collecting anything else under the guise of the "census".
i could go on, but you've clearly got an axe to grind.
Damned straight we do! The US government has repeatedly shown itself incapable of responsibly carrying out its duty to enumerate (and nothing more) the citizens for the sole purpose of apportioning our representatives.
If the government had historically refrained from abusing its power, we might have a different conversation here; as it stands - I answered question #1 with "2", and left the rest blank.
Oh, and those scaaaaary spooooky fines? They haven't issued a census-related fine since 1970, when a Hawaiian man challenged his $50 fine in court - And won.
You don't need math skills for programming work.
Why yes, thank you, I would like fries with that webpage.
This topic simply amazes me every time it comes up... Yes, you most certainly need decent math skills to work as a halfway decent programmer. No, every line of code you write won't require solving PDEs, but you will use, at a minimum, algebra, geometry/trig, and combinatorics (whether you know it or not) on a daily basis. And on the DB side, you'd damned well better know set theory inside and out.
Most code you write in the real world, in my experience, involves page after page of conditionals. No one "enjoys" that part of the job, we do it to cover our asses against the myriad crap users will try to force-feed a program. But after 500 lines of checking that nothing can possibly go wrong, at some point you need to do something with all that information. You need to plot sales trends, or minimize cost functions over several independent variables, or turn a list of options into a manufacturing-floor ready bill-of-materials (don't ever say "BOM" in an airport - I know this from personal experience) for a 747, or track a missile moving in 3d space toward the game's hero.
Yes, you can find formulas with Google. And if you don't have a solid background in math, you will misuse them (or fail to realize a far, far easier and more efficient solution exists).
So, in short, the paperless office is waiting on bigger displays.
For most of the reasons I use paper, an 8.5x11in 300dpi "tablet" (with a battery life long enough not to annoy me) would work just wonderfully.
Even then, though, I would still continue to leave "sticky" notes to myself on paper. For example, one of my favorite tricks made possible by nice thin LCD panels involves taking an index card, making two folds in it, and BAM, instant persistent note that sits neatly in the top "margin" of my screen. And best of all, it has four sides (six, actually, but using the middle part misses the point) I can use to recycle it.
When I can do that without using paper and for a yearly expense of under $0.49, we can talk.
Now, that said, it does very much annoy me when people explicitly print out a document so I can have a hardcopy. Just email me the damned thing and save a forest. This seems like a generational thing, IMO - Younger people just want the PDF, with all its glorious searchability, while older ones complain about things like font sizes and the "eye strain" of an illuminated background.
You're confusing the Intel 586 CPU with the Altos model 586 (which had an 8086 CPU running at a blazing 10 MHz)
D'oh! Okay, mods, beat me into oblivion. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...
A working 586? C'mon, not exactly modern, but not really ancient, either. Also zero chance of your box containing "one of the first" BBSs... For reference, Compuserve went live in 1969 - Six years before even the legendary Altair 8800, 17 years before Western Digital developed the IDE standard, and a good 24+ years before Intel released the CPU in Altos to which you refer.
I do find a 10MB HDD in a 586 somewhat strange, though... Yes, they certainly did exist, but it would have counted as an antique even back then. By the time I had a 586 (1994, they debuted in 1993), you could already get drives measured in gigabytes, and most people ran drives in the high-3-digit megabytes.
Others, however, have already given you your answer. Dump the whole FS over the serial link. Don't bother screwing around with trying to get it running in a modern box, just get what you want off it while it still works in its current form.
Are all car manufacturers that don't implement Mercedes new radar-guided emergency braking systems now liable when drivers rear end someone?
By the precedent set in this particular case - Yes.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drive around the block a few times. In reverse.
Huh? I doubt in the extreme that the DOD has gone to war with the CIA, or that they are this blatantly making like the Keystone Kops.
I know, right? Because, y'know, not like we had enough information to absolutely stop 9/11 from happening if only TweedleDee had shared his pie with TweedleDum...
I have a reasonably high level of confidence that either agency has their shit reasonably together. I have zero confidence that two organizations, both of whom encourage extreme distrust of everyone outside their own hierarchy, have any ability whatsoever to work cooperatively toward ording lunch, much less decreasing international terrorism.
You want my personal take on this? (Well, I'll give it anyway):
The CIA had this really great program that gave them a golden "in" with their targets.
The NSA said "Hey, cool idea, can we play too?"
"Nuh-uh"
"Pleeeeeease?"
"Nope"
"Well screw you guys, you goin' down!".
"Bring it!"
And as a result, two intelligence agencies will now produce significantly less information than either one could have alone.
Yes; In fact, I'm going to walk out on shaky ice and claim that every program [...snip...] uses more than one byte!
FTFY. Every program uses at least one full page of memory. Modern CPUs and OS-level memory management don't allow anything less.
So, thus far, some people have seen this as a "who watches the watcher" problem, some describe it as a white/blacklisting problem (though as far as I can see, he only appears to refer to blacklisting, not sure where people got the whitelisting idea from), some discuss the possibility of malware injecting itself into something else's address space, and still others complain that the malware could just let itself get swapped out like any other program.
For the sake of argument, lets assume that his explicitly listed premises all hold true, and that he has an infallable, uncrackable watcher.
His suggested means of detection still has one glaring problem that directly contradicts his conclusion:
"Two: not be active in RAM, but store itself in secondary storage. It cannot interfere with the detection algorithm then, quite obviously".
and...
"We can guarantee detection of malware. And that includes zero-day attacks and rootkits."
Now the problem (which others have mentioned, but none have taken the leap to why this breaks his method) - If this hypothetical malware does try to hide itself, his approach will detect it. If it doesn't try to hide, his approach reverts back to offline scanning of secondary storage - Which has a flaw which he explains right in his introduction:
"Anti-virus products scan for malware in two ways. They look for sequences of bits that are found in programs that are known to be bad (but which are not commonly found in good programs). And they run programs in sandboxes and look for known malicious actions. The first approach only catches known malware instances, while the second can also catch variants of these."
Thus, no zero-day detection for anything that doesn't try to hide.
Bah. Humbug! Bullsh*t. 64K ought to be enough for anybody surfing the web
Okay, joking aside, I have to ask how that works in practice - Even ignoring images, I've seen more than a few web pages where they HTML itself weighs in at more than 64k. Does it reload the page every time you scroll, throwing away everything up to (and after) your current position?
Hey! Where's Lynx?
Oh, look at Mr. Fancy-pants with his text all neatly positioned on the screen for him!
Real men use Wget or Curl. Bonus points for doing it all with netcat.
At some point, you have to take someone's word that the software you are loading on your computer is "trustworthy", unless you're going to write it all yourself.
Yes and no.
Yes, I don't personally audit every line of code I run on my computers, so in that sense I "trust" the FOSS community to act as a pretty damned effective first-line defense against most of the common crap commercial vendors try to pull (whether Sony rootkits or WGA or Energizer's recent scandal).
But also "No", in that if I notice some suspicious activity in a program I use, I can have the relevant source open in front of me five minutes later to see why it did what it did - Did it just get confused by a DNS timeout? Did it legitimately (it not necessarily with my permission) try to update itself to handle my request? Did it try to report everything I've done in the past 24 hours to a remote server in China under the guise of a "bug report"? With commercial software, I can at best block its action at the firewall and see what breaks; With FOSS, I can know what it did and act accordingly.
Free software isn't inherently more trustworthy, it simply moves the trust relationship around.
Yep, it does. And I'll trust a million strangers with no commercial interest in my life over a single CEO who sees me as a "resource" any day of the week, thankyouverymuch. And as a side-bonus, it also places more of that burden of trust right back on my shoulders. And while I may not always act in my own best interest, I do unwaveringly trust myself.
if they look like real money, is it even legal?
Can't speak for these in particular, but usually hollow coins start life as real coins.
The cheap ones, they just cut in half, gouge out a little pocket, and add a concealed hinge/pivot. The nicer ones actually unscrew and look almost like a very tiny pill bottle.
And I suppose, for the same reason those penny-squishing trinket-makers don't break the law, neither do these.
All released products have a spec sheet. The differences are form factor, frequency, radio power, antenna options and computing power.
:)
;)
True, and I'll credit them as giving more detailed product info than many companies - Except sometimes that information really doesn't help without knowing their baseline performance (ie, to me as a potential new customer). You mention radio power and CPU/memory, which I can see clearly on their spec sheets - But that doesn't really translate readily into "if you have LOS with a standard rubber duck (just as a point of reference, of course), you can serve X CPEs up to Y meters away"... Just some minimal level of service that I can work from.
If you have questions, try the forums
Done, and they have indeed helped me greatly.
I don't know what is so special about Aironet APs, can you explain why they might be favorable to anything else?
Honestly, I don't know why they work so well... But I've seen a good number of installations where, whether due to background RF or walls or just distance, a variety of other APs (including some supposedly high-end ones, but still only talking about SoHo products here - I've never had the privilege of working with the likes of Xirrus gear) gave poor to marginal performance (constant drop-offs, extremely low throughput, etc), and throwing in an Aironet with the exact same config worked like a charm. Perhaps they just have really high quality radios, perhaps they cheat and put out a hair more power than stated, I really don't know. But I've never had a complaint about them (other than that I do not consider myself a fan of IOS). I've gotten "lazy" to the point that I consider them almost a magic bullet in many single-AP situations - Someone wants me to fix a spotty (or often they use more "colorful" words) WiFi installation, I drop in an Aironet, and call it good for 15 minutes' work.
I actually had a "problem" with a pair of them once (both with 12(?)db omnis), where I didn't happen to know the SSIDs off the top of my head and had full signal-strength to both; I connected to the wrong one, over 100m away and through the walls of two all-steel-construction buildings. That right there just blew me away with respect for their performance.
That said, if you need more than one or two, the cost adds up fast - As others in this topic have pointed out, you can buy 10-15 WRT54GLs for the price of one 1142... So unless you literally need a drop-in fix - Well, I asked about Ubiquitis for a reason.
One other note- if you want to play with it you're only our less than $100, which is nothing. At least you get a radio with open software that you can use for anything.
Thinking I'll do exactly that. I'll pick up a bullet or three (which seems like their lowest common denominator, so I can always upgrade from there if needed) and see what they can do.
Thanks for the response, BTW.
When will someone come out with a viable competitor for PayPal so that we will finally have a choice?
A viable alternative already exists - Just use your bank as a CC payment processor.
My father runs a small business (under half a million gross per year), and about two years ago discovered that his bank would handle everything for a quite reasonable fee - About the same as he previously paid just to take Visa, and, as a bonus, he can accept the dreaded American Express (as well as just about any major CC) that so many small businesses refuse to touch (meaning he can accept corporate and government business, which tend to use AmEx almost exclusively).
If you expect mostly a lot of very small transactions (such as a typical web site "tip" jar), that model might not work so well. But if you sell anything best measured in "dollars" rather than "cents", it seems like a no-brainer.
Or just use Picostations, which is a bullet with an RP-SMA instead of an N type and a built in omni. But really with many users it seems like Rocket+Sector Antennas is the way to go, yeah?
Hey there... I have a vaguely similar project (a campground, more spread out users and outside, and I plan to use ChilliSpot in UAM from a dedicated Chilli/Radius/Squid backend server) coming up in a few months, and I see a lot of people swearing by Ubiqiti (particularly their Rockets), and certainly can't complain about the price...
I have to wonder, though... The FP specifically mentioned Aironets, and considering the price of their more modern versions (like the 1142), how does the Rocket M5 at under $100 compare favorably to an Aironet 1142 for $800? Just the "premium" nature of paying for Cisco gear, or does this reflect the more common situation where the Ubiqiti can pull 90% of the load for 10% of the price?
Also, I've seen mention of Bullets, Rockets, and Nano/PicoStations, and the product information on Ubiqiti's website does a piss-poor job of really differentiating them. Do those all act as standalone APs, or do some act as only radios and need a separate controller? Also, the Rocket (which a number of people have suggested by name) looks more like they intend it as a wireless bridge rather than an AP... The AirOS screenshots make it look like all of these can act in pretty much any common mode (station, AP, bridge, repeater), but does that really apply to all their products or would, say, a PicoStation only support AP or station mode while a Rocket only supports bridging?
As an IT Director (who came up through a 17 year career as an IT support person), I'm increasingly frustrated by IT admins who just don't see the big picture.
Except, who here has really missed the big picture?
Great, you have absolute control over your users desktop environments, every program they can run, and every web site they can get to. To what end? Boosting sales of iPhones?
Your admins fight with you because they know things you don't. You users will just move on to the easiest way to get what they want done, whether for work or recreation. At most companies, this has little consequence; At a hospital, it means that because you didn't want to deal with FireFox, you have confidential patient information sitting on Yahoo's servers in plaintext emails. Congrats, you have a bigger dick than your admins, see you in court.
The phishing messages often include instructions for opening up mail servers to enable spam relaying, to disable their host-based firewalls, and to open up unprotected network shares.
Why on Earth would I do that at the whim of my ISP or web host? I've actually gotten into arguments with known, real providers that insisted they needed access to my network to work properly (correct response - "No, no you don't - and neither does your competition"), I sure as hell wouldn't say "Oh, you have a new service? Cool, guess I'll chuck that Sonicwall in the trash now...".
This may target "your nephew who does your computer stuff at the office", but it sure as hell doesn't target IT professionals.
understand the illegality yet?
One problem with your analogy...
In this case, Ticketmaster counts as the asshole buying all the flour and selling it at a markup - And by explicit collusion with the original seller, no less, an arrangement that in most contexts would count as illegal.
Wiseguy simply found a way to trick the asshole into selling them a significant portion of the flour at $5, so they could then resell it for $6.
Personally, I fall on the "what crime?" side of this story, for one reason (unrelated to the BS about the captchas and the legally paid for botnet) - Ticketmaster just won their own ticket diversion case where they basically did the exact same thing as Wiseguy, except by selling to themselves, they didn't need to worry about silly little risks like competing with the public for prime tickets, they could just reserve them before sales even started.
That said, all of these clowns need 255 grains of lead administered transcranially. It amazes me that more of the actual performers don't take a stand (they don't get more money my the tickets passing through 27 middlemen, each tacking on their own fees) and say "if you do this, we won't play".
Believe it or not, some of us already knew the context of this issue and brought in information from other sources. For example:
So basically, yeah, they destroyed the original blood samples. And you can opt out of them keeping such samples in the future. But they will keep the DNA they already have, and they will collect the blood and keep the DNA from it in the future.
How, exactly, are anonymized blood samples going to used to track down missing persons or solve cold cases, or do anything else that hinges on tying a person to that blood sample?
TFA actually refers to two separate programs.
The first, and more chilling of the two, Texas hospitals have sent all newborn blood samples for entry into a DNA database since 2003. The second part, which came to light only because of the suit by parents over the first point, involves 800 anonymous samples for an mtDNA database. That part sounds reasonably innocuous (if still lacking in prior consent).
So, how "should" we feel about this? We should feel pretty damned pissed, and each and every one of us should flood our states, towns, and local hospitals with FOIA requests about possible variants of similar programs in our own areas. We should also (but of course won't) riot in the streets demanding the immediate destruction of this database and all samples taken, as well as a goddamned constitutional amendment explicitly granting us "genetic privacy" rights from both government and private (aka commercial) entities.
Instead, this will just fade from view without anyone really noticing or caring, and will expand until it contains each and every human in the country (and eventually, on the planet). And we'll still fail to stop illegal immigration or terrorist attacks, but you can bet your last penny it'll affect your ability to get loans and various types of insurance.
"Oh, sorry, your Genetic Rating (tm) says you probably won't live long enough to pay us back, can't help you with that new car".
I think users would like computers to ignore error conditions until they're done with all input related to performing an operation, for starters.
Absolutely, positively wrong. I don't mean that caustically - I see your idea, and consider it good in theory, but I can tell you from first-hand experience exactly what this leads to in practice:
"Hey, you the jackass that wrote this thing? Yeah, I just spent an hour putting in a quote for a customer standing in front of me, and now it tells me it can't connect to your server?"
At that point, give them a friendly error telling them the printer seems to be disconnected, and their print job will complete automatically, once they re-attach it.
Continuing with the previous example, the error message in question explicitly tells the user that it will just save a local copy (which they can print and otherwise work with as normal) until it can reconnect to the server. But no one actually reads that far.
At least if the program tells them it can't get to the server (and will save locally instead) right up front, you don't have to pretend to feel bad that they wasted an hour.
And yes, I've just described a real example (complete with me answering the phone to hear "hey jackass!").
There's lots of problems where there's no licensing board to pass, but for which the solution is important.
:)
Agreed. This doesn't fall into that category, however.
Then again, call me crazy, but I have no problem with having MSIE as the default, as long as you can replace it as the default and (if so desired) remove it fully from your system. Even if I never use it again, if nothing else it means that the second I finish an installation, I can grab updates manually.
Now, if you want to discuss Windows Media Player, I'll fall more on your side of the issue. I loathe that bloated piece of spyware that breaks all my associations every time I try to play some new file extension that I haven't yet bound to VLC.
2) General geek pedantry. Many geeks seem to love to be exceedingly pedantic about every little thing. If a definition isn't 100% perfect, at least in their mind, they jump all over it. I think it is a "Look at how smart I am!" kind of move. They want to show that they noticed that it wasn't 100% perfect and thus show how clever they are.
First of all, let me say that I fall in on Microsoft's side on this one - So they didn't use a shuffle that would pass muster for a licensed video poker system - So what? Totally irrelevant, they satisfied the obligation to randomize the list, end of story.
However, as to your comment about geek pedantry - I often get accused of doing exactly what you say, and can say comfortably that I don't do it to "look smart". I do it because if you bother defining a term, then immediately contradict yourself, we have a real problem. To a lesser degree, if you use a normally well-defined term incorrectly, then again, we have a problem.
I think geeks pick nits about such matters more for clarity than for self gratification. And I defend that stance by the fact that I demand similar precision from myself... If, in a conversation, I start down a path that leads to a contradiction, I will apologize, see if my intended point still holds despite the misstart, and proceed from there.
The fact that this habit tends to annoy others, I attribute to the fact that, in demanding such rigor from ourselves, we get fairly good at not making such errors all that often - Thus we seem to pick nits about others, but not ourselves.
Look, I'm just explaining how banks work. If you have an online business, you need a real world address and telephone number on your site.
What if you have an offline business?
Plenty of posts so far have gone back and forth between "he said she said" and "compliance yadda yadda yadda". But it seems no one has actually pointed out how this relates to the "real" world.
I can go down to my bank tomorrow and get a small business checking account with zero "compliance" checks involved (other than proof that I really exist). I can, at the same time (for a monthly plus various per-use fees), sign up to have my bank act as a payment processor so I can accept credit cards from my hypothetical customers.
I conspicuously don't need a website to do any of that. I don't need to put up a sign in front of my business with contact info; I don't need to prove that I have a listing in the phone book; I don't need to demonstrate that I have an advertising budget to make the world aware of me. They simply don't care. I have an account, they hold my money for me. Simple as that.
The bank needs to know that your customers will have a way to contact you in the real world to resolve disputes, otherwise the bank fears it will have to eat the costs of said disputes.
In what universe do banks ever eat the cost of disputes? Okay, they may have some overhead for dealing with disputes (and even that usually gets passed on to their direct customer), but in the end they pick who owes what and call it good. "Eating it" never even enters their consideration.
Intensive math training = Knowing that n^2 grows faster than n * log(n)?
No. You need the math background to understand why/how a given algorithm performs in O(n log(n)) rather than O(n^2). You need math to know when your O(n log(n)) actually degrades to O(n^2) (quicksort, as the classic example, does this in the worst case). You need math to know when to deliberately use an O(n^2) algorithm over an O(n log(n)) (again with quicksort, it has enough overhead that for sorting a few dozen items, you'll do it faster with a good ol' fashioned O(n^2) bubble sort. Not every algorithm you'll ever use comes in cookbook-form complete with a pre-calculated description of its worst/mean/best case efficiency.
You need math to understand when your algorithm exhibits stability, and when it trends off to +/- infinity. When it gives meaningless but apparently reasonable answers. When you can extend it to related systems (complex or multivariate cases, for example). Why some phrasings of an equation work in code and others fail miserable (arctangent as a good, if simplistic, example). When your hash function counts as secure vs good enough (MD5 no longer counts as "secure", but it still works 100% as good as ever in situations where "deliberate attack" doesn't apply). When you can deterministically optimize a system of equations, or can safely use a gradient descent method, or need to resort to simulated annealing (or similar local-minima avoiding techniques)
Finally, after analyzing dozens or hundreds of common algorithms, you will at the very least know of them and when to use them. When a well-known (in CS circles) problem comes up on a job, you won't spend two months trying either to reinvent the wheel or to squeeze Shuttle Crawler tires on a Vespa. This alone, regardless of your ability to actually create or analyze new algorithms, often means the difference between a hack and a good programmer.
So yes, I will agree with several other posters here - The difference between a self-taught programmer and a university trained one comes down to a single resounding answer, "Math".
And one more thing.. what's the big deal about teaching people hexadecimal? What's the purpose?
I could give a lot of answers to this, but one seems entirely too fitting to the topic - Because it lets you instantly see when an O(n log(n)) algorithm will suddenly take twice as long as the same algorithm on n-1.