Wexler came up with the most commonly used IQ test.
Both are male, BTW.
I don't believe that one number adequately describes a person's cognitive ability.
Most athletes are considered "dumb" by stereotype. Yet, look at what the announcers say when a player makes a mistake or a good move. In a mistake, we ask "What was he thinking?" "Is he stupid?" In a good move we say "What a brilliant move", etc. Ever seen a good basketball player that always seems to be in the right place at the right time? Is it because he physically overcome the others, or because he "knows" where to be?
Athletics, besides something like powerlifting, are primarily cognitive tasks, not physical ones. That is why they practice. That is why they have a coach. That is why the coach yells at them, and not asks them why they do not have physical abilities to do something.
However, I would imagine that most athletes would score lower on IQ tests than some other subset of the population. Feel free to fill in the blank.
If your niece is still fairly young, tell her to turn off her TV. Throw out her Hollywood-preaching magazines. Tell her to grab a physics book, the works of Plato, or some other intellectual material for her to read and contemplate. Get her involved in sports. Teach her about camping and farming. Please, help your niece before it's too late.
Soon she will learn to become comfortable in her isolation from the rest of society.
(the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level, and therefore they take having that skill for granted and expect that everyone should be able to do it....
Many men, on the other hand, prefer explicit/formal communication and either dismiss these non-verbal cues as unimportant, or (just as likely) are unable to reliably detect them at all.
OK. So there appears to be differences between men and women. Don't you think that IQ could be one of those differences as well? Especially when men made the test?
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible?
Emotions are irrational and transient in time, logic is not.
Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause?
Albeit I guess there is a "logical cause" in perception, but if I told you that someone close to you died and you believed me, you would probably be upset to some degree regardless of the truth of the person being alive or dead.
A person could be very upset about something important like breaking a fingernail, and at the peak of that upset condition that same person finds out that they just won $10,000,000 in the state lottery, and almost immediately the fingernail is not important anymore.
I cannot invalidate emotions. They are a very important part of human life, but they are illogical and it takes very specific circumstances for emotions to surface and for them to go away.
Does everybody here still cry and get upset when they don't get a piece of candy? If emotions were logical, then the same condition would evoke the same response.
Although a study like this does nothing productive, I would assume that on average women are not as intelligent (ie, score higher on IQ tests) than men.
After all, men made the tests. When we talk about benchmarks for computers, we say over and over again that benchmarks are very predictive of how well a computer system will score on a benchmark. The same goes with IQ tests.
It also goes for your idiot boss. Well, that idiot boss is your boss for some reason, and not the other way around.
I firmly believe that men and women are equal when men can bear children and feed them from their breasts. Not a minute before.
It seems as though relative prices for some recreational items have steadily decreased, while others have steadily decreased.
Electronics and computers are exponentially better than they were 20 years ago, yet the actually cost less, even disregarding inflation. The catch is that you "need" more electronics junk today than you did not too long ago. Think about it. What is common in households today. TV, phone, cellphone, dishwasher, video player, cable or satellite service, stereo or home theater system, answering machine, game console, computer, etc. Actually, minus the dishwasher, all of that stuff is common for kids that are freshmen in college and have not had a fulltime job.
Granted CDs and movies have actually gone down in price considering inflation, but not much.
We as the consumer simply want more for our money. If the price of CDs halved or quartered, I would bet that people would spend as much or more on music, but they will have a more diverse collection like their electronic "necessities".
Actually, I'm floored at all of the things that an average non-working college kid "needs" in his doom. Not that I'm envious or anything, but its a lot. Think back as to when each of those devices were introduced to the public. Many are from within 30 years.
Is it just me or does anyone else wonder what's up with the Japanese obsession with robots?
FYI, 1 out of every 2 robots is in Japan, so a trickle down from industry to the home seems reasonable.
Also, Japanese are obsessed with electronic gadgets. I had a Japanese friend who came to visit and he and his girlfriend had these electronic pedometers that were kind of like pets to them. I never knew the why camera phones existed until I saw a TV clip of Avril Lavine in Japan and all you could see were phones in the air taking pictures.
Cultures are different.
Once someone manages to get an AI system up to the point of being as smart as say a dog
I have much higher expectations than that. I'm beginning to wish that the lower 70% or so of the human population rank ordered by IQ would disappear, even if it includes me.
Re:Its bad idea for several reasons
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 1
Chiefly among them is sometimes you can't tell what the fucking words are.
I've only encountered that once, and there was a link right below the image that said "If you can't read the text in the image, click here" and a new image came up. I don't remember if it preserved my form information or if it was necessary, but that was the first time I've come across a captcha that I could not read and the first time I saw a link that asked me if I could read it or not.
Its a good enough idea. Even with a captcha defeating library, a fairly skilled person would have to write a script or something to parse the webform (optionally over SSL which is a little more difficult) and programatically decode the captcha and then fill in the form and submit it.
Usernames and passwords are a bad idea, but we use them. Using cookies or special URLs like slashdot has (or had, not sure) to automatically login is a bad idea.
But they are acceptable for now, relatively simple to implement and use. There have been captcha defeaters for a while. It shouldn't be that tough to do at least a decent percentage of the time and accept a high failure rate because it is automated. It does not have to be 100%. Hell, I've seen captchas that I could not read before, and I'm a human!
You're missing the point. The whole point of having a public/private keypair is that the private key never leaves the client's computer.
I don't believe I'm missing the point anymore than everyone else is. As it stands, the most prevalent way to "identify" someone's identity on computer systems is with a username and password. Its also worth noting that SSL certs are signed by a third party and they seem to be trusted by most people, regardless if that trust is valid or not, it really hasn't been challenged.
I'm not feeling well enough to think much more. I just would like to have a fairly secure yet easy method for authentication on computer systems. The best approach I've found thus far is using ssh and a passphrase protected private key that is unlocked once I log into my local machine, and from there I am able to securely access any number of machines without worrying about passwords or whatever. As I said, the downside of this method is that there is no way to ensure that the remote user has their private key adequately protected, and some sites have a policy to reject all authentication based on keys in favor of username/passwords which is not really any more secure than an unprotected private key.
Considering this funding on a per victim basis, this must be the most expensive public safety program yet.
Consider how many people have been killed in automobile accidents, and how comparatively little public money gets spent 'preventing' that carnage.
There might not be another terrorist attack on US soil for the next decade, but I'll guarantee that more than 40,000 people will die on US roads next year.
True. Human behavior and its irrationality is amusing at times.
In dealing with safety and humans, the underlying thing is risk perception. A person will walk quickly with no problem across a 1 foot wide plank on the ground. Raise the plank a few stories, and then the person will walk much more carefully and slowly.
Objectively, the whole fear of terrorism thing is irrational. But then all emotions are irrational and temporary. Granted 40,000 people will die while driving every year, and we all drive every day, but nobody has seen a 3,000 car pileup with 3,000 casualties at one time either. The same goes for air travel in general. People are much more scared of flying than driving in a car, but even if the driver were to suddenly die while driving, other drivers and passengers are not necessarily in immediate danger of death. Its a little different on an airplane -- the plank has been raised a few stories this time.
Granted, there is absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent a group of organized people that are willing to die to ensure the success of their mission. That can be fearful, so doing anything, even speaking to gods can lessen the fear.
It took him 30 yrs, but he learned Gate's lesson - the money is in the software.
You just don't get it.
Apple is about making quality end-to-end solutions. They can't do it for free, so they charge for it. They are not bad off financially, in fact they are doing quite well.
Embarrassingly enough, I was watching Monster Garage or one of those chopper shows, and Jesse James was talking about how his business made money making fenders and whatnot to ship to Europe. They pretty much broke even on making bikes, and those bikes go for up to over $100k.
Corporations are more to blame for the decline of science than the government.
Don't think so. Last time I checked, most cutting edge science is done by the government. There is little immediate profit in fundamental research. Two of the biggest examples are the military and the space program. Almost all of out technology that we use today can be traced back to one of those two groups. Another source for research are government funded universities and/or government grants at universities.
Most industrial development is ultimately driven by companies looking to make money on new technologies.
Yup. They bring the stuff to our living rooms by mass production and making things affordable for the general public.
Until corporate America can look past next quarter's numbers, R&D will not really exist in the U.S. anymore.
Maybe this is a lull in the R&D market, but its typical for a larger company to spend about 10% on R&D.
As much as I despise the military, it serves a great purpose for people to dig into their pockets out of fear. As much as I distrust the government, they do have a way of providing funding for many smart people to do things that they could not do on their own or at a private corporation. Its just a necessary evil I guess.
I'm not sure what "corresponding Intel product" Intel would use. If its an x86 chip, give it up Intel.
Now in terms of bang for your buck, AMD Opteron wins hands down. Now for raw performance (as if only geeks care for games I guess) I would like to see a showdown between Itanium and Opteron.
Now any failing command in a script started like that will cause the script to bail. This should be your standard way of writing a shell script.
Thanks, but no thanks. I write shell scripts in bourne shell for a reason, and I check the error status of commands I care about for a reason, I redirect stdout and stderr for a reason, and I'm anal about logging hairy scripts for a reason.
Also, rm -f always returns true, so the #!/bin/sh -e will not catch anything interesting there.
Further, any POSIX-compliant command has an "end of options" indicator, --.
POSIX compliant commands _should_ use the -- thing, but its not required. Most all of the GNU utilities honor the -- flag. Its a good thing.
Really, the use of wildcards in script that run unattended is just dangerous... if you're doing it, re-code.
Like this:
find "${DATADIR}" -type f -exec rm {} \;
Yes, it is dangerous for those that are sloppy, but in following your example, I would do:
test -d $DATADIR && rm ${DATADIR}/*
Just as safe, and possibly orders of magnitude faster and its easier to type and read.
Its also common for me to do rm *.* or more qualified rm *.bak or similar instead of open '*'s. Whatever is safest, and will not fail.
Anyone who doesn't get heart palpitations when writing rm commands to be run by a script as root is either inexperienced or unimaginative.
I have no problem doing rm's as root in an unintended script. At least _my_ script:) I've been burned by a LaTeX or teTex or something similar installation script that had a mistake and did rm -rf $DATADIR/* or something like that without testing for the existance of $DATADIR and the $DATADIR was not defined. I lost most everything, but thank god it was my personal box.
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line entering the arena
There is nothing that new about a microprocessor that has been hacked since the 70's. Other computer systems have evolved and changed chip designs, but not in the PeeCee land.
First the OB-peeve: Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed or relative performance, only that the number of transistors per unit of area will double every X months (where X lies between 12 and 18, depending on which "version" of his law you use).
Actually, I believe its every 18 to 24 months, but there may be a 12 month version of Moore's statement. I'm fairly pedantic about calling it a law, its just a human achievement like going to the moon, eating 40 hotdogs at a sitting, or spinning plates. There is no law. Enough nitpicking.
Also, the standard x86 line appears to have reached a ceiling with Moore's predictions. In fact, the whole Pentium IV appears to have been a dead end, and they are silently advancing the PIII instead. The Itanium processor does appear to be maintaining the 18-24 month transistor density doubling. Obligatory wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law.
Remember, it's the pr0n industry that drives computer video tech.
Ah, that is why there are so many "DVD quality" downloads that are DRMed with Windows Media Player and are much lower quality than a DVD and not even near HD.
I hear this argument all the time, but I've never experienced it. If anybody knows where to get this cutting edge HQ porn, let me know. The best quality of porn I've seen is on DVD and it was just DVD quality that was probably shot with a prosumer DV camera -- nothing special.
I have an HDTV with _only_ DVI inputs. Unless there is a cheap hardware hack to continue using my TV, I'm done. Its difficult for me to justify the expense of my TV and service for the 5 or so HDTV channels I get. I've become a video quality snob, and its difficult to watch SDTV or even DVDs anymore. They don't do my TV justice.
So, we come back to the eternal argument of "How do I convince people to pay for things that I'm in possession of in the presence of high demand?" My answer, flood us with new quality stuff. Just like porn does.
I have a DVR that has a firewire output, and I have never even attempted to hook my powerbook to it to capture a show or movie. Why? Its not worth my time or effort. Between repeats and my DVR and tons of other incoming material, there is simply no need for me to waste my time and effort to do what I can already do.
Maybe I'm in the minority of TV viewers out there, but I don't see the lack of something to watch. Quality might be an issue, but recording something and watching it over and over again will not improve quality. The same goes for DVDs. I won't rip a DVD because it simply takes too much of my time. As soon as HD-DVDs come out, I will enjoy the picture quality, and my desire to rip one will decrease.
1a. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives. 1b. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective. 2. Electronic or digital products and systems considered as a group: a store specializing in office technology. 3. Anthropology. The body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.
To me, technology, like any other -ology, is the knowledge of something, especially using the scientific method. Everybody knows themselves and somebody else and animals, but they are not psychologists. Everybody knows a group of people, but they are not a sociologist. Most everybody has seen a calculator or a computer, but that does not make them a technologist either. Give a computer or a calculator to someone that does not know how to add, and they will not know how to add with the calculator either.
My point being is that there are a number of prerequisites besides hardware for technology to be applied in education. I get annoyed at the concept that technology is something that spontaneously does stuff for people. It doesn't.
Americans are already behind the most of the world in basic education like math, science, and history. I believe that all aspects of education should be reexamined. The feel good, "I'm confident in my ignorance", attitude simply cannot last much longer, unless we start outsourcing that too.
Although they don't say it in the disclaimer, their actions of posting a disclaimer after posting the article screams that they realize the article is flawed. If that's the case, why publish it in the first place? Shouldn't they have had some foresight and left this one on the cutting room floor? Maybe Finance is different, but I remember it being very difficult to get an article published unless it was groundbreaking and free from any minor flaws.
Yes, the web page was lacking in methodology and had a number of possible confounds, but it was just a web page. Unless I missed something it was not an article nor was it published, but rather one of millions of worthless web pages out there on the internet.
Even the slashdot summary states:
This study conducted by students is 'not an NCSA publication and was not conducted as part of any NCSA project or under the supervision of NCSA'. "
A passworded SSH key is just a passwordless key that's been symmetrically encrypted with a passphrase, and it has to be decrypted on the client side before it can be used. The SSH protocol could've added a bit to tell the server that the key started off encrypted, but the client could just as easily have been patched to always tell it "true".
Yes, I realize that it is not a simple problem to overcome because once the key is decrypted with a passphrase, it is the same as a non-passphrase protected key.
I'm no crypto expert, but having something like the first byte of the public key that indicates the passphrase state of the private key would be great. There seems to be some way to overcome this issue. I've heard of sites that do not allow any keyed access to their sites because of the lack of assurance that a passphrase was used to protect the user's local private key.
It seems like the information could be signed some way like an SSL cert, but I could be wrong out of not knowing enough about the low level aspects of ssh.
Slashdot Mirror
Spearman, the statistician, came up with the original IQ term. You can google or read a little about it http://www.personalityresearch.org/intelligence/sp earman.html at that link.
Wexler came up with the most commonly used IQ test.
Both are male, BTW.
I don't believe that one number adequately describes a person's cognitive ability.
Most athletes are considered "dumb" by stereotype. Yet, look at what the announcers say when a player makes a mistake or a good move. In a mistake, we ask "What was he thinking?" "Is he stupid?" In a good move we say "What a brilliant move", etc. Ever seen a good basketball player that always seems to be in the right place at the right time? Is it because he physically overcome the others, or because he "knows" where to be?
Athletics, besides something like powerlifting, are primarily cognitive tasks, not physical ones. That is why they practice. That is why they have a coach. That is why the coach yells at them, and not asks them why they do not have physical abilities to do something.
However, I would imagine that most athletes would score lower on IQ tests than some other subset of the population. Feel free to fill in the blank.
If your niece is still fairly young, tell her to turn off her TV. Throw out her Hollywood-preaching magazines. Tell her to grab a physics book, the works of Plato, or some other intellectual material for her to read and contemplate. Get her involved in sports. Teach her about camping and farming. Please, help your niece before it's too late.
Soon she will learn to become comfortable in her isolation from the rest of society.
(the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level, and therefore they take having that skill for granted and expect that everyone should be able to do it. ...
Many men, on the other hand, prefer explicit/formal communication and either dismiss these non-verbal cues as unimportant, or (just as likely) are unable to reliably detect them at all.
OK. So there appears to be differences between men and women. Don't you think that IQ could be one of those differences as well? Especially when men made the test?
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible?
Emotions are irrational and transient in time, logic is not.
Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause?
Albeit I guess there is a "logical cause" in perception, but if I told you that someone close to you died and you believed me, you would probably be upset to some degree regardless of the truth of the person being alive or dead.
A person could be very upset about something important like breaking a fingernail, and at the peak of that upset condition that same person finds out that they just won $10,000,000 in the state lottery, and almost immediately the fingernail is not important anymore.
I cannot invalidate emotions. They are a very important part of human life, but they are illogical and it takes very specific circumstances for emotions to surface and for them to go away.
Does everybody here still cry and get upset when they don't get a piece of candy? If emotions were logical, then the same condition would evoke the same response.
I agree with you completely.
Although a study like this does nothing productive, I would assume that on average women are not as intelligent (ie, score higher on IQ tests) than men.
After all, men made the tests. When we talk about benchmarks for computers, we say over and over again that benchmarks are very predictive of how well a computer system will score on a benchmark. The same goes with IQ tests.
It also goes for your idiot boss. Well, that idiot boss is your boss for some reason, and not the other way around.
I firmly believe that men and women are equal when men can bear children and feed them from their breasts. Not a minute before.
Look at other emerging markets.
That is something that is not mentioned enough.
It seems as though relative prices for some recreational items have steadily decreased, while others have steadily decreased.
Electronics and computers are exponentially better than they were 20 years ago, yet the actually cost less, even disregarding inflation. The catch is that you "need" more electronics junk today than you did not too long ago. Think about it. What is common in households today. TV, phone, cellphone, dishwasher, video player, cable or satellite service, stereo or home theater system, answering machine, game console, computer, etc. Actually, minus the dishwasher, all of that stuff is common for kids that are freshmen in college and have not had a fulltime job.
Granted CDs and movies have actually gone down in price considering inflation, but not much.
We as the consumer simply want more for our money. If the price of CDs halved or quartered, I would bet that people would spend as much or more on music, but they will have a more diverse collection like their electronic "necessities".
Actually, I'm floored at all of the things that an average non-working college kid "needs" in his doom. Not that I'm envious or anything, but its a lot. Think back as to when each of those devices were introduced to the public. Many are from within 30 years.
Is it just me or does anyone else wonder what's up with the Japanese obsession with robots?
FYI, 1 out of every 2 robots is in Japan, so a trickle down from industry to the home seems reasonable.
Also, Japanese are obsessed with electronic gadgets. I had a Japanese friend who came to visit and he and his girlfriend had these electronic pedometers that were kind of like pets to them. I never knew the why camera phones existed until I saw a TV clip of Avril Lavine in Japan and all you could see were phones in the air taking pictures.
Cultures are different.
Once someone manages to get an AI system up to the point of being as smart as say a dog
I have much higher expectations than that. I'm beginning to wish that the lower 70% or so of the human population rank ordered by IQ would disappear, even if it includes me.
Chiefly among them is sometimes you can't tell what the fucking words are.
I've only encountered that once, and there was a link right below the image that said "If you can't read the text in the image, click here" and a new image came up. I don't remember if it preserved my form information or if it was necessary, but that was the first time I've come across a captcha that I could not read and the first time I saw a link that asked me if I could read it or not.
Its a good enough idea. Even with a captcha defeating library, a fairly skilled person would have to write a script or something to parse the webform (optionally over SSL which is a little more difficult) and programatically decode the captcha and then fill in the form and submit it.
Usernames and passwords are a bad idea, but we use them. Using cookies or special URLs like slashdot has (or had, not sure) to automatically login is a bad idea.
But they are acceptable for now, relatively simple to implement and use. There have been captcha defeaters for a while. It shouldn't be that tough to do at least a decent percentage of the time and accept a high failure rate because it is automated. It does not have to be 100%. Hell, I've seen captchas that I could not read before, and I'm a human!
You're missing the point. The whole point of having a public/private keypair is that the private key never leaves the client's computer.
I don't believe I'm missing the point anymore than everyone else is. As it stands, the most prevalent way to "identify" someone's identity on computer systems is with a username and password. Its also worth noting that SSL certs are signed by a third party and they seem to be trusted by most people, regardless if that trust is valid or not, it really hasn't been challenged.
I'm not feeling well enough to think much more. I just would like to have a fairly secure yet easy method for authentication on computer systems. The best approach I've found thus far is using ssh and a passphrase protected private key that is unlocked once I log into my local machine, and from there I am able to securely access any number of machines without worrying about passwords or whatever. As I said, the downside of this method is that there is no way to ensure that the remote user has their private key adequately protected, and some sites have a policy to reject all authentication based on keys in favor of username/passwords which is not really any more secure than an unprotected private key.
EOF
Considering this funding on a per victim basis, this must be the most expensive public safety program yet.
Consider how many people have been killed in automobile accidents, and how comparatively little public money gets spent 'preventing' that carnage.
There might not be another terrorist attack on US soil for the next decade, but I'll guarantee that more than 40,000 people will die on US roads next year.
True. Human behavior and its irrationality is amusing at times.
In dealing with safety and humans, the underlying thing is risk perception. A person will walk quickly with no problem across a 1 foot wide plank on the ground. Raise the plank a few stories, and then the person will walk much more carefully and slowly.
Objectively, the whole fear of terrorism thing is irrational. But then all emotions are irrational and temporary. Granted 40,000 people will die while driving every year, and we all drive every day, but nobody has seen a 3,000 car pileup with 3,000 casualties at one time either. The same goes for air travel in general. People are much more scared of flying than driving in a car, but even if the driver were to suddenly die while driving, other drivers and passengers are not necessarily in immediate danger of death. Its a little different on an airplane -- the plank has been raised a few stories this time.
Granted, there is absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent a group of organized people that are willing to die to ensure the success of their mission. That can be fearful, so doing anything, even speaking to gods can lessen the fear.
They may have given the books away to other libraries in the system
And where do they give their books in turn?
It might be best to send them to India. They could probably find some use for them.
there is nothing like books when it comes to learning; it's not easy to highlight, markup and take notes on a public computer or a loaned out laptop.
So your the asshole that wrote all over the library books.
It took him 30 yrs, but he learned Gate's lesson - the money is in the software.
You just don't get it.
Apple is about making quality end-to-end solutions. They can't do it for free, so they charge for it. They are not bad off financially, in fact they are doing quite well.
Embarrassingly enough, I was watching Monster Garage or one of those chopper shows, and Jesse James was talking about how his business made money making fenders and whatnot to ship to Europe. They pretty much broke even on making bikes, and those bikes go for up to over $100k.
The prefer to make bikes over fenders.
And who would do the signing? Would you ship your private keys over the Internet to a "trusted" 3rd party clearinghouse ...
Its all about who you trust. Do you trust that green and white piece of paper can buy you something?
Corporations are more to blame for the decline of science than the government.
Don't think so. Last time I checked, most cutting edge science is done by the government. There is little immediate profit in fundamental research. Two of the biggest examples are the military and the space program. Almost all of out technology that we use today can be traced back to one of those two groups. Another source for research are government funded universities and/or government grants at universities.
Most industrial development is ultimately driven by companies looking to make money on new technologies.
Yup. They bring the stuff to our living rooms by mass production and making things affordable for the general public.
Until corporate America can look past next quarter's numbers, R&D will not really exist in the U.S. anymore.
Maybe this is a lull in the R&D market, but its typical for a larger company to spend about 10% on R&D.
As much as I despise the military, it serves a great purpose for people to dig into their pockets out of fear. As much as I distrust the government, they do have a way of providing funding for many smart people to do things that they could not do on their own or at a private corporation. Its just a necessary evil I guess.
I'm not sure what "corresponding Intel product" Intel would use. If its an x86 chip, give it up Intel.
Now in terms of bang for your buck, AMD Opteron wins hands down. Now for raw performance (as if only geeks care for games I guess) I would like to see a showdown between Itanium and Opteron.
#!/bin/sh -e
:) I've been burned by a LaTeX or teTex or something similar installation script that had a mistake and did rm -rf $DATADIR/* or something like that without testing for the existance of $DATADIR and the $DATADIR was not defined. I lost most everything, but thank god it was my personal box.
Now any failing command in a script started like that will cause the script to bail. This should be your standard way of writing a shell script.
Thanks, but no thanks. I write shell scripts in bourne shell for a reason, and I check the error status of commands I care about for a reason, I redirect stdout and stderr for a reason, and I'm anal about logging hairy scripts for a reason.
Also, rm -f always returns true, so the #!/bin/sh -e will not catch anything interesting there.
Further, any POSIX-compliant command has an "end of options" indicator, --.
POSIX compliant commands _should_ use the -- thing, but its not required. Most all of the GNU utilities honor the -- flag. Its a good thing.
Really, the use of wildcards in script that run unattended is just dangerous... if you're doing it, re-code.
Like this:
find "${DATADIR}" -type f -exec rm {} \;
Yes, it is dangerous for those that are sloppy, but in following your example, I would do:
test -d $DATADIR && rm ${DATADIR}/*
Just as safe, and possibly orders of magnitude faster and its easier to type and read.
Its also common for me to do rm *.* or more qualified rm *.bak or similar instead of open '*'s. Whatever is safest, and will not fail.
Anyone who doesn't get heart palpitations when writing rm commands to be run by a script as root is either inexperienced or unimaginative.
I have no problem doing rm's as root in an unintended script. At least _my_ script
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line entering the arena
There is nothing that new about a microprocessor that has been hacked since the 70's. Other computer systems have evolved and changed chip designs, but not in the PeeCee land.
First the OB-peeve: Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed or relative performance, only that the number of transistors per unit of area will double every X months (where X lies between 12 and 18, depending on which "version" of his law you use).
Actually, I believe its every 18 to 24 months, but there may be a 12 month version of Moore's statement. I'm fairly pedantic about calling it a law, its just a human achievement like going to the moon, eating 40 hotdogs at a sitting, or spinning plates. There is no law. Enough nitpicking.
Also, the standard x86 line appears to have reached a ceiling with Moore's predictions. In fact, the whole Pentium IV appears to have been a dead end, and they are silently advancing the PIII instead. The Itanium processor does appear to be maintaining the 18-24 month transistor density doubling. Obligatory wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law.
Remember, it's the pr0n industry that drives computer video tech.
Ah, that is why there are so many "DVD quality" downloads that are DRMed with Windows Media Player and are much lower quality than a DVD and not even near HD.
I hear this argument all the time, but I've never experienced it. If anybody knows where to get this cutting edge HQ porn, let me know. The best quality of porn I've seen is on DVD and it was just DVD quality that was probably shot with a prosumer DV camera -- nothing special.
When Will These Idiots Get It?
As soon as the money stops to flow.
I have an HDTV with _only_ DVI inputs. Unless there is a cheap hardware hack to continue using my TV, I'm done. Its difficult for me to justify the expense of my TV and service for the 5 or so HDTV channels I get. I've become a video quality snob, and its difficult to watch SDTV or even DVDs anymore. They don't do my TV justice.
So, we come back to the eternal argument of "How do I convince people to pay for things that I'm in possession of in the presence of high demand?" My answer, flood us with new quality stuff. Just like porn does.
I have a DVR that has a firewire output, and I have never even attempted to hook my powerbook to it to capture a show or movie. Why? Its not worth my time or effort. Between repeats and my DVR and tons of other incoming material, there is simply no need for me to waste my time and effort to do what I can already do.
Maybe I'm in the minority of TV viewers out there, but I don't see the lack of something to watch. Quality might be an issue, but recording something and watching it over and over again will not improve quality. The same goes for DVDs. I won't rip a DVD because it simply takes too much of my time. As soon as HD-DVDs come out, I will enjoy the picture quality, and my desire to rip one will decrease.
From http://www.answers.com/technology&r=67
1a. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives.
1b. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective.
2. Electronic or digital products and systems considered as a group: a store specializing in office technology.
3. Anthropology. The body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.
To me, technology, like any other -ology, is the knowledge of something, especially using the scientific method. Everybody knows themselves and somebody else and animals, but they are not psychologists. Everybody knows a group of people, but they are not a sociologist. Most everybody has seen a calculator or a computer, but that does not make them a technologist either. Give a computer or a calculator to someone that does not know how to add, and they will not know how to add with the calculator either.
My point being is that there are a number of prerequisites besides hardware for technology to be applied in education. I get annoyed at the concept that technology is something that spontaneously does stuff for people. It doesn't.
Americans are already behind the most of the world in basic education like math, science, and history. I believe that all aspects of education should be reexamined. The feel good, "I'm confident in my ignorance", attitude simply cannot last much longer, unless we start outsourcing that too.
Although they don't say it in the disclaimer, their actions of posting a disclaimer after posting the article screams that they realize the article is flawed. If that's the case, why publish it in the first place? Shouldn't they have had some foresight and left this one on the cutting room floor? Maybe Finance is different, but I remember it being very difficult to get an article published unless it was groundbreaking and free from any minor flaws.
Yes, the web page was lacking in methodology and had a number of possible confounds, but it was just a web page. Unless I missed something it was not an article nor was it published, but rather one of millions of worthless web pages out there on the internet.
Even the slashdot summary states:
This study conducted by students is 'not an NCSA publication and was not conducted as part of any NCSA project or under the supervision of NCSA'. "
Maybe I'm underreacting.
A passworded SSH key is just a passwordless key that's been symmetrically encrypted with a passphrase, and it has to be decrypted on the client side before it can be used. The SSH protocol could've added a bit to tell the server that the key started off encrypted, but the client could just as easily have been patched to always tell it "true".
Yes, I realize that it is not a simple problem to overcome because once the key is decrypted with a passphrase, it is the same as a non-passphrase protected key.
I'm no crypto expert, but having something like the first byte of the public key that indicates the passphrase state of the private key would be great. There seems to be some way to overcome this issue. I've heard of sites that do not allow any keyed access to their sites because of the lack of assurance that a passphrase was used to protect the user's local private key.
It seems like the information could be signed some way like an SSL cert, but I could be wrong out of not knowing enough about the low level aspects of ssh.