Yeah, but the good news is if you think about spreadsheets WHILE you're getting laid, your prowess is soon to be the subject of girls' locker room whispering. Because there ain't nothing less sexy than spreadsheets. Infinite staying power is at your command.
Trust me. Don't think about Java or Perl or Transact SQL -- they're WAY too sexy, in fact in my experience they have the opposite effect. But a little bit of spreadsheet logic goes a long way.
Re:Old computers are still very useful
on
Implementing VisiCalc
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, something you should probably have pointed out to you before you complain about a school buying a new computer lab, new parking lot or new fieldhouse, is that this money doesn't come from the budget that pays for teachers & staff. That money comes from taxes...it's the only way to run a public institution. You have a budget and know exactly how much you're getting, and you divvy that up in expenses that you exactly how must everything costs.
That new fieldhouse, and those computers, come either from a grant from the state, a gift from the community, or a bond voted on by the public. They were paid for with a one time windfall that the school will never see again. It's up to the school to use this as best as it can. If a fieldhouse makes alumni donate $10k more per year, at little or no recurring cost to the school, it's a sound investment. You can't point out that the same school is barely able to pay its employees, because that problem is related to people not voting for an increase in school taxes, or the state cutting funding, or (in the case of New York) the state suddenly deciding that everybody's going to pay 30% less school taxes. The people who granted the money for the computers or the fieldhouse don't want that money used to pay an arithmetic professor...even if that's a better use for the cash. And most states have such strict rules with grants that the school would have to full some real accounting fast ones to do this in the first place. Misappropriation of funds is the kind of thing that causes principals their jobs, and they're otherwise in a pretty secure situation.
It's like having a birthday where all you get is toys...only you're 27, and you could really use the cash, not to mention clean socks and underwear. I guarantee you that even as those school in Cali are firing 25,000 employees, many of them will be getting bitchin' new lunchrooms and rooms full of top of the line flatscreen Dells. My old university just finished building a $15,000,000 student union, despite needing new dorms so much they're renting a HoJo. Of course, they'd have to PAY for the dorm.
I agree. So did Phillips, which is why the Pronto has a series of 7 totally programmable, macro-able, and hierarchical tactile buttons. I barely ever turn my touchscreen on, since i can mute, turn volume up and down (on the receiver) and change channels (on the TV) and play / pause (these buttons control the ld, vcr and dvd players, depending on what's turned on) with the hardware buttons. They're really nice rubber buttons, with the + buttons having a little convex groove and the - buttons having a concave groove.
The pronto's other big feature is its skinnability.
I have to deal with a wife who is two thirds of a luddite and won't do something, no matter how much she might want to, if it involves pushing more than one button or learning more about a device than what color it is. Dealing with this level of pigheaded stupidity is a challenge that the pronto helps me overcome. I have the "home" screen set up with a photo I took of each device in our theatre...to turn on something and set it up exactly the way she expects it to be when it's turned on, all she has to do is push the area of the remote that looks like the device.
I also have a textual list of common things ("tape hgtv," "listen to NPR," "turn everything off") on another menu. Each item in the list performs all the necessary setup to do each task, from starting the device up if it needs to to shifting modes.
The pronto has massively good range, a very responsive touchscreen, and an IR system which is very accurate as well. It's the only aftermarket remote I've ever found that will control some of my more obscure devices (my Sherwood receiver, for example, which uses a very low frequency and strange pulse modulation so you have to pay Sherwood $80 for a replacement).
The only problem with it is that it's roughly the size of a tricorder from the original star trek.
I don't see why language choice is a long term decision. I've only been in the industry five years and have already switched my primary language twice.
If you know Java, you can learn C# in about thirty seconds. In fact, the major differences aren't in syntax (of which there are only a handful, like forcing a break on the last line of a switch, and using lock() instead of synchronized()), they're in the API itself.
I love Java, but for what people want our applications to do, and for the way we want them to interact with their systems which are 100% windows based and always will be (unfortunately), the.NET framework makes more sense. The ubiquity of the CLI means we can almost totally ignore testing on individual windows versions and still have a nice, secure, abstracted system.
"Google's focus on R&D doesn't really mesh with the financial accountability of a publicly traded company"
"Modern shareholders are chickenshit squatters who care more about their liqudity of their portfolio then they do about the future of the company or its products."
True innovation and really new developments will always come from small business, where commitee thinking is almost non existant and against the grain geniuses are considered an asset and not dangerous dead wood.
As soon as the head of a company gets his eyes on the prize of some arbitrarily huge number of lucrative options, you can pretty much forget about taking risks. Every company I've worked for that's gone IPO has very suddenly switched into maintenance mode, treading water in a market they were breaking records in with a casual sidestroke. Red tape increases and so does the ratio of useful hours to administrative BS. And strong, brave CEOs easily cave under the heel of a room full of industry delphis with the power to fire indiscriminately.
Product failures mean firings of smart people to appease the same. And there's always the chance that some rogue company with a discordant worldview will take you over, complete with more firings for "redundancy" and to afford bullshit multi million dollar "Good Faith" payments. Can you imagine Google owned by Inktomi...or Slashdot owned by Microsoft?
Google doesn't seem to be struggling. They have the position and the clout to manipulate the fund -- repay -- fund cycle necessary to afford new development. So who cares if you want a framed Google OneShare?
This is better for you. It's better for us. It's better for them. (With all due respect to Cap. K)
...but because of the abuse factor, and the numerous questions involved(do you update the geostamp when it passes through a system that reprocesses the content, like we do with timestamps? is this a router level concept or a user level concept?), I think it may be best to included the location as a part of the content itself rather than in the header.
Reuters is already doing this with something they call a "dateline." They also encode usernames with something called a "byline," and summarize content with "jump text."
When I'm working hard, tapping stuff out to meet a deadline, debugging and so on, I'm just a monkey.
When I'm sitting back, puzzling solutions, running tests, writing documentation and proposing action plans, I'm an engineer.
Basically, engineers are a bit more "theoretical" and technicians are more "hands on." Which is the reason I don't consider you a "Network Engineer" if all you do is pull cards all day and hang ethernet cable from the rafters.
There's TONS of bandwidth left on cable. Thanks to digital boxes (which take 1/100th of the spectrum that a broadcast channel does), most cable companies are at a small fraction of their max bandwidth.
Cable's such a great solution...it's big, thick, has high potential and is well insulated. It's got less noise than power lines and better range then telephone while being less expensive than copper.
Of course, there's also the matter of the supply boxes at the head end. VOD suppliers are like massive DVRs that operate in parellel -- and they're not perfect yet. There's still a lot of lag when they get loaded and many companies have yet to scale the number of their VOD boxes to match the number of digital subscribers.
I kind of worry that this is intended to replace the really cool DVR devices TW has been testing. The menu system is great and they go a beyond Tivo and the like by allowing your to record almost all pay channels and PPV material (first run stuff is black of course), and by having simple native support for watching one channel while recording another. Sure, Tivo can do this, but it's complicated as hell...my mom, who never even figured out her VCR, uses the DVR without trouble.
Since I spent the past two weeks learning Dan Berstein's tinydns and qmail, I'm inclined to agree with you. These two are probably bulletproof. However, all this guy does is write small, insecure software for 10 year old protocols. He spends a lot of time on security, and not much on developing new features or ways to make his software easy to admin (it's not impossible, it just takes longer than other sendmail subsitutes).
I think that when HLLs like Java are used for preliminary implementations of new protocols, we get security and ubiquity first. And really, that's what you want when you've got a new app. This is one of the things I think Freenet has done very much right. Java has not signficantly slowed down the network, but has made it easier to do complicated things without flaws becoming exploits. Fewer people can do more sooner.
Eventually, hypersecure, hyperoptimized tools like Bernstein's will be created for everything. Until then, I'll take the "free" security over the free speed of C.
Actually, this sounds like a catch-22 on your part as well. "Bloat is bad even if it brings security. We need to have the most heavily optimized applications possible, so we can run them on obsolete hardware."
I think you can run Linux on a machine that doesn't have a 33 MHz bus, man. If you tell your boss that a $300 processor and memory upgrade will allow you to use a free application that'll keep company records and email secure, I'm pretty sure he'll open his wallet.
Actually,.NET got it right for a completely different reason. The language in.NET is totally inconsequential...it's just a way to interact with a fast (well, faster than Java -- but I'd say it's because MS knows more "speed hacks" in their OS than Sun does) virtual machine-like abstraction layer called the CLR. Everything not marked as an "unsafe" block runs under the CLR, whether it's written in C#, VB or Managed C.
Java can do the same shit through Native Library support. But it wouldn't help...because the stuff you're talking about optimizing, asm and so forth, is the IO stuff that is most likely to be exploited anyway. It's like an armored car with tinfoil doors.
The point of this article is that I/O should be done in these high level, exception handling languages and that essential interactive ops should be in secure libraries. It may not seem like that speedy graphics hack you wrote will ever be cause for an exploit...but if it fails when the right key combo is hit, and down the line somebody relies on your API for a login window...bam! R00t.
I am sick and tired of this "Competent Admin" prick waving. It's a rehash of the old "only bad girls get knocked up" mentality. If you're rooted, it's because your were a Bad Admin.
Bullshit. Exploits happen -- and they're going to happen right through your firewall, over your precious port 23, and right into your public key encrypted file system. And when it counts, they're going to happen well before the information hits BugTraq.
What makes you a Competent Admin is quickly noticing attacks, quickly responding to them, and getting the machines back up as fast as possible once they're done. Closing ports and shoving totalitarian password policies in peoples' faces isn't going to do that. Knowing your systems...monitoring them and knowing a usage spike from an attack...is the only way.
I guess "The Price of Free Software is Eternal Vigilance" (Don't know who I'm ripping off there, besides Wing Commander IV).
Comparing two things that are completely different and saying one's better than the other...hmmm...kinda reminds me of the whole Linux vs Windows debate this website was on about so long ago. Whatever happened to that?
I've had my philosophy ramatically altered by concepts such as the "simple systems theory" outlined by Stephen Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science," as well as some of the other cause and effect type sci-fi (Cat's Cradle comes to mind).
As a result, I've been reducing the size of my applications, to allow complexity to grow naturally on simple rules rather than insert it artificially.
The result is I'm doing more with less code, and typing less for grander apps.
How is "Free as in Freedom" in software "Old Fashioned?" In the "olden days" I used to have to spend a few hundred bucks just for a goddamn closed source DOS. God forbid I needed a database or drawing app...I paid $600 for Generic CAD in 1989, and it was crap.
"Free as in Freedom" is the new liberal paradigm of software development. In many ways it flys in the face of greed and discounts the acheivement of the individual hacker in favor of the "group effort." Face it man, you're not a Quaker, you're a damn hippie. We all are.
I don't think that Apple is necesarily wrong for clinging to the old way of selling quality, easy to use software with closed source, since their business model for the past 30 years or so has been selling quality, easy to use software with closed source. Apple's spin on shared source may not be very libertarian, but it is DAMN good for Apple, and if you like the hardware/design aspect you've got to take the sluggish interface too.
Oh great. Can't wait to hear all the linux-is-life assholes complain about the "Jaguar Tax."
I can see the reason for running Linux on an Apple laptop, but still think it's silly to buy an Apple laptop just to use Linux. Especially since I've yet to run into a Linux app that wouldn't compile with a minimum of fuss on 10.2 with xfree86.
The one time I tried snowboarding, I had to wear a size 14 boot. It still wasn't wide enough. I was pretty good at the snowboarding part, considering I was wearing clown shows, but we had to give up after only being on the slopes for an hour because my feet were bleeding.
I wear a 10 1/2 EEEE. Please, tell me what shoestore he goes to...I buy new New Balance sneakers every six months, and new Dunham boots every eight.
Incidentally, I buy a new mac laptop once a year, but that's just because my rich mac friend never remembers to save enough cash to pay his property taxes...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the good news is if you think about spreadsheets WHILE you're getting laid, your prowess is soon to be the subject of girls' locker room whispering. Because there ain't nothing less sexy than spreadsheets. Infinite staying power is at your command.
Trust me. Don't think about Java or Perl or Transact SQL -- they're WAY too sexy, in fact in my experience they have the opposite effect. But a little bit of spreadsheet logic goes a long way.
Well, something you should probably have pointed out to you before you complain about a school buying a new computer lab, new parking lot or new fieldhouse, is that this money doesn't come from the budget that pays for teachers & staff. That money comes from taxes...it's the only way to run a public institution. You have a budget and know exactly how much you're getting, and you divvy that up in expenses that you exactly how must everything costs.
That new fieldhouse, and those computers, come either from a grant from the state, a gift from the community, or a bond voted on by the public. They were paid for with a one time windfall that the school will never see again. It's up to the school to use this as best as it can. If a fieldhouse makes alumni donate $10k more per year, at little or no recurring cost to the school, it's a sound investment. You can't point out that the same school is barely able to pay its employees, because that problem is related to people not voting for an increase in school taxes, or the state cutting funding, or (in the case of New York) the state suddenly deciding that everybody's going to pay 30% less school taxes. The people who granted the money for the computers or the fieldhouse don't want that money used to pay an arithmetic professor...even if that's a better use for the cash. And most states have such strict rules with grants that the school would have to full some real accounting fast ones to do this in the first place. Misappropriation of funds is the kind of thing that causes principals their jobs, and they're otherwise in a pretty secure situation.
It's like having a birthday where all you get is toys...only you're 27, and you could really use the cash, not to mention clean socks and underwear. I guarantee you that even as those school in Cali are firing 25,000 employees, many of them will be getting bitchin' new lunchrooms and rooms full of top of the line flatscreen Dells. My old university just finished building a $15,000,000 student union, despite needing new dorms so much they're renting a HoJo. Of course, they'd have to PAY for the dorm.
I agree. So did Phillips, which is why the Pronto has a series of 7 totally programmable, macro-able, and hierarchical tactile buttons. I barely ever turn my touchscreen on, since i can mute, turn volume up and down (on the receiver) and change channels (on the TV) and play / pause (these buttons control the ld, vcr and dvd players, depending on what's turned on) with the hardware buttons. They're really nice rubber buttons, with the + buttons having a little convex groove and the - buttons having a concave groove.
The pronto's other big feature is its skinnability.
I have to deal with a wife who is two thirds of a luddite and won't do something, no matter how much she might want to, if it involves pushing more than one button or learning more about a device than what color it is. Dealing with this level of pigheaded stupidity is a challenge that the pronto helps me overcome. I have the "home" screen set up with a photo I took of each device in our theatre...to turn on something and set it up exactly the way she expects it to be when it's turned on, all she has to do is push the area of the remote that looks like the device.
I also have a textual list of common things ("tape hgtv," "listen to NPR," "turn everything off") on another menu. Each item in the list performs all the necessary setup to do each task, from starting the device up if it needs to to shifting modes.
The pronto has massively good range, a very responsive touchscreen, and an IR system which is very accurate as well. It's the only aftermarket remote I've ever found that will control some of my more obscure devices (my Sherwood receiver, for example, which uses a very low frequency and strange pulse modulation so you have to pay Sherwood $80 for a replacement).
The only problem with it is that it's roughly the size of a tricorder from the original star trek.
Dude, if you post on slashdot, a Maserati ain't gettin' you laid.
I don't see why language choice is a long term decision. I've only been in the industry five years and have already switched my primary language twice.
If you know Java, you can learn C# in about thirty seconds. In fact, the major differences aren't in syntax (of which there are only a handful, like forcing a break on the last line of a switch, and using lock() instead of synchronized()), they're in the API itself.
.NET framework makes more sense. The ubiquity of the CLI means we can almost totally ignore testing on individual windows versions and still have a nice, secure, abstracted system.
I love Java, but for what people want our applications to do, and for the way we want them to interact with their systems which are 100% windows based and always will be (unfortunately), the
"Google's focus on R&D doesn't really mesh with the financial accountability of a publicly traded company"
"Modern shareholders are chickenshit squatters who care more about their liqudity of their portfolio then they do about the future of the company or its products."
True innovation and really new developments will always come from small business, where commitee thinking is almost non existant and against the grain geniuses are considered an asset and not dangerous dead wood.
As soon as the head of a company gets his eyes on the prize of some arbitrarily huge number of lucrative options, you can pretty much forget about taking risks. Every company I've worked for that's gone IPO has very suddenly switched into maintenance mode, treading water in a market they were breaking records in with a casual sidestroke. Red tape increases and so does the ratio of useful hours to administrative BS. And strong, brave CEOs easily cave under the heel of a room full of industry delphis with the power to fire indiscriminately.
Product failures mean firings of smart people to appease the same. And there's always the chance that some rogue company with a discordant worldview will take you over, complete with more firings for "redundancy" and to afford bullshit multi million dollar "Good Faith" payments. Can you imagine Google owned by Inktomi...or Slashdot owned by Microsoft?
Google doesn't seem to be struggling. They have the position and the clout to manipulate the fund -- repay -- fund cycle necessary to afford new development. So who cares if you want a framed Google OneShare?
This is better for you. It's better for us. It's better for them. (With all due respect to Cap. K)
...but because of the abuse factor, and the numerous questions involved(do you update the geostamp when it passes through a system that reprocesses the content, like we do with timestamps? is this a router level concept or a user level concept?), I think it may be best to included the location as a part of the content itself rather than in the header.
Reuters is already doing this with something they call a "dateline." They also encode usernames with something called a "byline," and summarize content with "jump text."
I meant to say fiber. The ideas in that post were pretty sound, but I got dyslexic on all the terms.
Garfield: "Mondays."
When I'm working hard, tapping stuff out to meet a deadline, debugging and so on, I'm just a monkey.
When I'm sitting back, puzzling solutions, running tests, writing documentation and proposing action plans, I'm an engineer.
Basically, engineers are a bit more "theoretical" and technicians are more "hands on." Which is the reason I don't consider you a "Network Engineer" if all you do is pull cards all day and hang ethernet cable from the rafters.
"High Potential" should be "low resistance." It's fairly easy to amplify, too.
There's TONS of bandwidth left on cable. Thanks to digital boxes (which take 1/100th of the spectrum that a broadcast channel does), most cable companies are at a small fraction of their max bandwidth.
Cable's such a great solution...it's big, thick, has high potential and is well insulated. It's got less noise than power lines and better range then telephone while being less expensive than copper.
Of course, there's also the matter of the supply boxes at the head end. VOD suppliers are like massive DVRs that operate in parellel -- and they're not perfect yet. There's still a lot of lag when they get loaded and many companies have yet to scale the number of their VOD boxes to match the number of digital subscribers.
I kind of worry that this is intended to replace the really cool DVR devices TW has been testing. The menu system is great and they go a beyond Tivo and the like by allowing your to record almost all pay channels and PPV material (first run stuff is black of course), and by having simple native support for watching one channel while recording another. Sure, Tivo can do this, but it's complicated as hell...my mom, who never even figured out her VCR, uses the DVR without trouble.
Didn't Urkel drive one of those?
Aren't I going to get a wedgie for knowing this?
Since I spent the past two weeks learning Dan Berstein's tinydns and qmail, I'm inclined to agree with you. These two are probably bulletproof. However, all this guy does is write small, insecure software for 10 year old protocols. He spends a lot of time on security, and not much on developing new features or ways to make his software easy to admin (it's not impossible, it just takes longer than other sendmail subsitutes).
I think that when HLLs like Java are used for preliminary implementations of new protocols, we get security and ubiquity first. And really, that's what you want when you've got a new app. This is one of the things I think Freenet has done very much right. Java has not signficantly slowed down the network, but has made it easier to do complicated things without flaws becoming exploits. Fewer people can do more sooner.
Eventually, hypersecure, hyperoptimized tools like Bernstein's will be created for everything. Until then, I'll take the "free" security over the free speed of C.
Actually, this sounds like a catch-22 on your part as well. "Bloat is bad even if it brings security. We need to have the most heavily optimized applications possible, so we can run them on obsolete hardware."
I think you can run Linux on a machine that doesn't have a 33 MHz bus, man. If you tell your boss that a $300 processor and memory upgrade will allow you to use a free application that'll keep company records and email secure, I'm pretty sure he'll open his wallet.
Actually, .NET got it right for a completely different reason. The language in .NET is totally inconsequential...it's just a way to interact with a fast (well, faster than Java -- but I'd say it's because MS knows more "speed hacks" in their OS than Sun does) virtual machine-like abstraction layer called the CLR. Everything not marked as an "unsafe" block runs under the CLR, whether it's written in C#, VB or Managed C.
Java can do the same shit through Native Library support. But it wouldn't help...because the stuff you're talking about optimizing, asm and so forth, is the IO stuff that is most likely to be exploited anyway. It's like an armored car with tinfoil doors.
The point of this article is that I/O should be done in these high level, exception handling languages and that essential interactive ops should be in secure libraries. It may not seem like that speedy graphics hack you wrote will ever be cause for an exploit...but if it fails when the right key combo is hit, and down the line somebody relies on your API for a login window...bam! R00t.
I am sick and tired of this "Competent Admin" prick waving. It's a rehash of the old "only bad girls get knocked up" mentality. If you're rooted, it's because your were a Bad Admin.
Bullshit. Exploits happen -- and they're going to happen right through your firewall, over your precious port 23, and right into your public key encrypted file system. And when it counts, they're going to happen well before the information hits BugTraq.
What makes you a Competent Admin is quickly noticing attacks, quickly responding to them, and getting the machines back up as fast as possible once they're done. Closing ports and shoving totalitarian password policies in peoples' faces isn't going to do that. Knowing your systems...monitoring them and knowing a usage spike from an attack...is the only way.
I guess "The Price of Free Software is Eternal Vigilance" (Don't know who I'm ripping off there, besides Wing Commander IV).
Comparing two things that are completely different and saying one's better than the other...hmmm...kinda reminds me of the whole Linux vs Windows debate this website was on about so long ago. Whatever happened to that?
I've had my philosophy ramatically altered by concepts such as the "simple systems theory" outlined by Stephen Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science," as well as some of the other cause and effect type sci-fi (Cat's Cradle comes to mind).
As a result, I've been reducing the size of my applications, to allow complexity to grow naturally on simple rules rather than insert it artificially.
The result is I'm doing more with less code, and typing less for grander apps.
How is "Free as in Freedom" in software "Old Fashioned?" In the "olden days" I used to have to spend a few hundred bucks just for a goddamn closed source DOS. God forbid I needed a database or drawing app...I paid $600 for Generic CAD in 1989, and it was crap.
"Free as in Freedom" is the new liberal paradigm of software development. In many ways it flys in the face of greed and discounts the acheivement of the individual hacker in favor of the "group effort." Face it man, you're not a Quaker, you're a damn hippie. We all are.
I don't think that Apple is necesarily wrong for clinging to the old way of selling quality, easy to use software with closed source, since their business model for the past 30 years or so has been selling quality, easy to use software with closed source. Apple's spin on shared source may not be very libertarian, but it is DAMN good for Apple, and if you like the hardware/design aspect you've got to take the sluggish interface too.
Oh great. Can't wait to hear all the linux-is-life assholes complain about the "Jaguar Tax."
I can see the reason for running Linux on an Apple laptop, but still think it's silly to buy an Apple laptop just to use Linux. Especially since I've yet to run into a Linux app that wouldn't compile with a minimum of fuss on 10.2 with xfree86.
Well, you know what they say about guys with big feet... ...they have trouble typing on the skinny-ass mac keyboards.
(seriously, the other thing they say about guys with big feet is totally true, ladies, and goes double for under-pronators with wide duck feet)
Oh, don't get me started on skiis!
The one time I tried snowboarding, I had to wear a size 14 boot. It still wasn't wide enough. I was pretty good at the snowboarding part, considering I was wearing clown shows, but we had to give up after only being on the slopes for an hour because my feet were bleeding.
I wear a 10 1/2 EEEE. Please, tell me what shoestore he goes to...I buy new New Balance sneakers every six months, and new Dunham boots every eight.
Incidentally, I buy a new mac laptop once a year, but that's just because my rich mac friend never remembers to save enough cash to pay his property taxes...