... unless you can have some sort of weird twitter username that doesn't reveal your real identify *and* have a blue tick.
First people want to be anonymous, then the government (like China?) wants to force us to use our real names but this seems like some mental jujitsu that makes us all want to use our real verified names because the blue tick means we are special?
I am actually not some super paranoid person about doing this. It is an ok idea, seems like a good idea to be able to have some sort of verification or even Slashdot-like karma that you are a good actor.
I find much to disagree but there is some room for improvement.
I think some oversight or setting standards and best practices and maybe a little of what NGO's do for underdeveloped countries where they don't control the election but have some federal officials which "witness" what is going on. And maybe not in *every* district just problematic ones or random ones to see if there are issues.
The risk is that if you set up a federal election system then you *can* have control and fraud on a national scale. Right now it is so disconnected with different structures and voting booths, etc it would be practically impossible to do coordinated fraud. We have local city, county and state governments for reasons and there are reasons to not have 100% central control of government. An analogy might be the school system. Do we want or require the federal government actually run all the schools in the country? Likely not, but they might be able to help do some oversight and help without actually taking full control. Side observation is that people (parents) seem a lot more motivated to make sure *their* child is being educated well than the average person is involved with voting and local government.
IMHO, the current POTUS doesn't have the proper respect for data and nuance of collecting all the voting data from across the country to be the right person to do the job. The initial missteps of the voter suppression commission he created seems more about throwing something together quickly than really doing a good long term job. It seems like they are going to throw a lot of data together than should be carefully handled and might take years to properly merge. The commission will end up with lots of dups and anomalies which will be taken as evidence of the fraud and abuse they want to find and used to justify a bunch of voter suppression laws.
First I tried tweaking the fb app and Messager app to tweak down tracking and auto-play videos etc. And each time there was some sort of fb privacy tracking story I would get a bit more paranoid. I deleted the Messages app. Later a deleted the regular Facebook app. My general feeling is that I am tracked less and have more privacy although I don't specifically know what. I do slightly miss more active notifications of Facebook activity.
Facebook is like one of those people at a party who greets you with an uncomfortably long hug... they feel or want to be closer to you than you to them.
I remember reading an article about Moore's Law and some rough calculations that at some point we would have to have the energy of the Sun moving through our computers to keep up with performance. In some sort of Matrix-style universe maybe the Milky-way is just some of super advanced alien data center.:-)
I understand that 24 hours news sites need to fill a lot of air time or that news web sites would like something new for you to look at each time you refresh but not everyone wants to follow the news as it happens and sort it out themselves.
Do you want to follow the balloon boy story, be fooled and then read about the sorted details as it unfolds... or maybe I just want to read about it a few days later wrapped (mostly) up.
Do you want to read the entire stream of new articles on digg.com when they have 0 diggs or do you only want to read them later when others have dugg them and you can read the cream of the crop?
Why do you read Slashdot? Because the quality of the articles and rated comments is higher than randomly surfing the internet.
How about evacuting a city several times because of a hurricane but it misses?
How about spending a lot to avoid global climate change that never happens or does not turn out to be as bad as predicted by our current understanding?
The only way I can think to explain this to the "general public" is to make the analogy with insurance. A cost you incur but probably never get any benefit from.
...I'll admit that is an intentionally provocative and somewhat misleading title but COBOL is probably the only "language" I've written that approaches xml in verbosity while still being readable. Yes, xml isn't a language but I do seem to end up doing a lot of minor hand edits to it. Anyway, during my very short time doing COBOL I quickly concluded it was never going to be a language I wanted to do much in after coming across the following statement
PRINT "Hello World!" AFTER ADVANCING ONE LINE;
To best of my faded knowledge that is a valid line of COBOL.
Clearcase does have a higher admin overhead than CVS. Clearcase also does not work particularly well over a WAN and I suspect ext3cow or something similar would have the same issue. The use model for a SCM tool based on ext3cow would be similar to NFS which you usually do not use on a WAN.
Just because the hardware gets faster and faster and CPU buses, networks and graphics cards change and improve peple think that everything has changed and that the old school rules don't apply. I'm thinking about team organizations and how one produces a product. There are lessons we learned a hundred years ago during the industrial revolution that I continually find people relearning today. About making changes as the last minute and quality assurance. Information technology allows some parts of managing an organization to react quicker and better than we could in the past but there are something about producing a model T and producing a Firefox extension that are the same. For example, understanding what your customers want and testing it for quality. The rapid pace of change in computer hardware enables people forget that not all the rules have changed.
I hate to just chime with my own two cents and wild guess but I've had the same experience and tracked it down to iTunes opening a song from Shared Music. It a small wide rectangular window saying "Opening URL..." or something. I have seen it up for longer when there are network problems. You can reproduce it by clicking on Next Song several times quickly just as quickly as it can load songs.
If the user doesn't care about security then it is hard to add more security without making the system more difficult to use.
On the other hand a system infected with viruses and trojans can be un-usable.
In all fairness to MS, the Windows history is from a novice single user or small work group. Windows was kinda of thrust onto the Internet, by, well, the growth of the Internet. It is more usable and less secure because of that.
Linux has the whole multi-user UNIX, USENET, geek, Internet history behind it. It is more secure and less usable because of that.
I see Windows and Linux evolving toward each other in security, in usability and in many other ways.
I don't have any hard data but it seems like early in the day (~8am EDT) and later in the day (5-7pm EDT) it picks up too.
I've kinda assumed this is because the spammers had day jobs and they spammed just before and after work, but it could also be because there is some reason spammers think we are more likely to read it at those hours.
One last though... isn't regular junk snail mail suppose to be sent to arrive on Friday's for some reason? Because it will sit on your kitchen table on the weekend?
I've used make/gnumake a lot for C/C++ and Java. I've used ant a lot for Java.
For a large primarily Java project ant is the hands down winner. It has two advantages over make. Out of the box, ant "knows" how to build java and java technologies. The same way that the make "knows" how to build C/C++ and UNIX style stuff. Sure you can do this in make but not without a lot of additional rules and setup... and it never feels as seamless as in ant. The second thing ant does is only use one java JVM to do the build. Each java compile happens in the same JVM that ant is running in. With make you are constantly reinvoking the JVM and it really slows things down.
$50 is so insignificant compared to what someone will likely spend on games in one of these devices.
Here is a partial list of things that you'll spend more on the "media" than the device itself, although everyone focuses on the purchase price of the device.
Game Consoles DVD Players CD Players Printers Razors
Read several books and talk to lots of people and you'll start to get a feel for what the right thing to do is. Ask someone, family/friend, that you trust.
The only specific book I'll mention is _Making the Most of Your Money_ by Jane Bryant Quinn. It is a good general monkey book which is probably the place to start rather than diving into the investing side of the equation.
I also like the general approach of the Motley Fool guys although I haven't spent much time at their site in a couple years.
Summary: to get data from a db to MySQL use PHP to read the db and print out a MySQL script that loads all the data.
It is nice to highlight that you can read lots of different databases using odbc in PHP, but still.
This basic concept is obvious to anyone with familiarity with MySQL. I mean, come on, "pick a language that can read the database in question and use it to dump the data into a format that can be read my MySQL".
This program could have been written in Visual Basic or C# or anything that can read the database you want to convert.
A more interesting PHP program that could have taken *any* two arbitrary odbc databases (MySQL can be accessed through odbc) and dumped table definitions and data from one db to the other.
One really hard part of plans is to catch *all* the things you are going to need to recover. This advice is kinda like the old advice to actually test your backups occasionally.
For example, if you have plans to relocate the headquarters to a different site then every 6 or 12 months so try it out to sort out the "glitches". To expand on this example, does everyone know where the other site is and how to get there? How will they know to go there? Are there problems of quorum, where half the managers will be at one site and half at the other making contradicting decisions? Etc, etc, etc... This is also a good time to learn about how your organization operates.
Whatever your plans and contingencies do regular dry runs of them, to the extent that it is practically possible.
Several years ago when I found myself on an understaffed tightly (insanely) scheduled project I, and several others on the project, read _Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving "Mission Impossible" Projects_ by Edward Yourdon.
I see a lot of Yourdon's advice in these/. comments. Basically to know what you are getting into and do it with eyes wide open. There are both reasons to do it (money, foot in the door, etc) and reasons to run away, but your most important time to negotiation is before you say "yes".
Slashdot Mirror
... unless you can have some sort of weird twitter username that doesn't reveal your real identify *and* have a blue tick.
First people want to be anonymous, then the government (like China?) wants to force us to use our real names but this seems like some mental jujitsu that makes us all want to use our real verified names because the blue tick means we are special?
I am actually not some super paranoid person about doing this. It is an ok idea, seems like a good idea to be able to have some sort of verification or even Slashdot-like karma that you are a good actor.
I find much to disagree but there is some room for improvement.
I think some oversight or setting standards and best practices and maybe a little of what NGO's do for underdeveloped countries where they don't control the election but have some federal officials which "witness" what is going on. And maybe not in *every* district just problematic ones or random ones to see if there are issues.
The risk is that if you set up a federal election system then you *can* have control and fraud on a national scale. Right now it is so disconnected with different structures and voting booths, etc it would be practically impossible to do coordinated fraud. We have local city, county and state governments for reasons and there are reasons to not have 100% central control of government. An analogy might be the school system. Do we want or require the federal government actually run all the schools in the country? Likely not, but they might be able to help do some oversight and help without actually taking full control. Side observation is that people (parents) seem a lot more motivated to make sure *their* child is being educated well than the average person is involved with voting and local government.
IMHO, the current POTUS doesn't have the proper respect for data and nuance of collecting all the voting data from across the country to be the right person to do the job. The initial missteps of the voter suppression commission he created seems more about throwing something together quickly than really doing a good long term job. It seems like they are going to throw a lot of data together than should be carefully handled and might take years to properly merge. The commission will end up with lots of dups and anomalies which will be taken as evidence of the fraud and abuse they want to find and used to justify a bunch of voter suppression laws.
First I tried tweaking the fb app and Messager app to tweak down tracking and auto-play videos etc. And each time there was some sort of fb privacy tracking story I would get a bit more paranoid. I deleted the Messages app. Later a deleted the regular Facebook app. My general feeling is that I am tracked less and have more privacy although I don't specifically know what. I do slightly miss more active notifications of Facebook activity.
Facebook is like one of those people at a party who greets you with an uncomfortably long hug... they feel or want to be closer to you than you to them.
I remember reading an article about Moore's Law and some rough calculations that at some point we would have to have the energy of the Sun moving through our computers to keep up with performance. In some sort of Matrix-style universe maybe the Milky-way is just some of super advanced alien data center. :-)
I understand that 24 hours news sites need to fill a lot of air time or that news web sites would like something new for you to look at each time you refresh but not everyone wants to follow the news as it happens and sort it out themselves.
Do you want to follow the balloon boy story, be fooled and then read about the sorted details as it unfolds... or maybe I just want to read about it a few days later wrapped (mostly) up.
Do you want to read the entire stream of new articles on digg.com when they have 0 diggs or do you only want to read them later when others have dugg them and you can read the cream of the crop?
Why do you read Slashdot? Because the quality of the articles and rated comments is higher than randomly surfing the internet.
How about evacuting a city several times because of a hurricane but it misses?
How about spending a lot to avoid global climate change that never happens or does not turn out to be as bad as predicted by our current understanding?
The only way I can think to explain this to the "general public" is to make the analogy with insurance. A cost you incur but probably never get any benefit from.
...I'll admit that is an intentionally provocative and somewhat misleading title but COBOL is probably the only "language" I've written that approaches xml in verbosity while still being readable. Yes, xml isn't a language but I do seem to end up doing a lot of minor hand edits to it. Anyway, during my very short time doing COBOL I quickly concluded it was never going to be a language I wanted to do much in after coming across the following statement
PRINT "Hello World!" AFTER ADVANCING ONE LINE;
To best of my faded knowledge that is a valid line of COBOL.
Clearcase does have a higher admin overhead than CVS. Clearcase also does not work particularly well over a WAN and I suspect ext3cow or something similar would have the same issue. The use model for a SCM tool based on ext3cow would be similar to NFS which you usually do not use on a WAN.
Just because the hardware gets faster and faster and CPU buses, networks and graphics cards change and improve peple think that everything has changed and that the old school rules don't apply. I'm thinking about team organizations and how one produces a product. There are lessons we learned a hundred years ago during the industrial revolution that I continually find people relearning today. About making changes as the last minute and quality assurance. Information technology allows some parts of managing an organization to react quicker and better than we could in the past but there are something about producing a model T and producing a Firefox extension that are the same. For example, understanding what your customers want and testing it for quality. The rapid pace of change in computer hardware enables people forget that not all the rules have changed.
I hate to just chime with my own two cents and wild guess but I've had the same experience and tracked it down to iTunes opening a song from Shared Music. It a small wide rectangular window saying "Opening URL..." or something. I have seen it up for longer when there are network problems. You can reproduce it by clicking on Next Song several times quickly just as quickly as it can load songs.
Athena did this and continues to do this with UNIX on the campus.
e .1 9f.html
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N19/history_of_ath
I've never used it but we all have probably used X11 which came out of it.
Adaptive Cruise Control Article
How many words per minute could I type if I didn't actually have to move my fingers?
To say nothing of having an imbeded PDA in my head reminding me of appointments I'm missing.
What I *really* want is image recognition tied into my vision so I can instantly remember the name anyone I've ever seen before.
If the user doesn't care about security then it is hard to add more security without making the system more difficult to use.
On the other hand a system infected with viruses and trojans can be un-usable.
In all fairness to MS, the Windows history is from a novice single user or small work group. Windows was kinda of thrust onto the Internet, by, well, the growth of the Internet. It is more usable and less secure because of that.
Linux has the whole multi-user UNIX, USENET, geek, Internet history behind it. It is more secure and less usable because of that.
I see Windows and Linux evolving toward each other in security, in usability and in many other ways.
Once more with the right tags...
Mignight Spaghetti
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:Rxo2u3fTySEJ: midnightspaghetti.com/news.htm+midnight+spaghetti& hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Ask your doctor rather than ask Slastdot.
I don't have any hard data but it seems like early in the day (~8am EDT) and later in the day (5-7pm EDT) it picks up too.
I've kinda assumed this is because the spammers had day jobs and they spammed just before and after work, but it could also be because there is some reason spammers think we are more likely to read it at those hours.
One last though... isn't regular junk snail mail suppose to be sent to arrive on Friday's for some reason? Because it will sit on your kitchen table on the weekend?
I've used make/gnumake a lot for C/C++ and Java. I've used ant a lot for Java.
For a large primarily Java project ant is the hands down winner. It has two advantages over make. Out of the box, ant "knows" how to build java and java technologies. The same way that the make "knows" how to build C/C++ and UNIX style stuff. Sure you can do this in make but not without a lot of additional rules and setup... and it never feels as seamless as in ant. The second thing ant does is only use one java JVM to do the build. Each java compile happens in the same JVM that ant is running in. With make you are constantly reinvoking the JVM and it really slows things down.
$50 is so insignificant compared to what someone will likely spend on games in one of these devices.
Here is a partial list of things that you'll spend more on the "media" than the device itself, although everyone focuses on the purchase price of the device.
Game Consoles
DVD Players
CD Players
Printers
Razors
Read several books and talk to lots of people and you'll start to get a feel for what the right thing to do is. Ask someone, family/friend, that you trust.
The only specific book I'll mention is _Making the Most of Your Money_ by Jane Bryant Quinn. It is a good general monkey book which is probably the place to start rather than diving into the investing side of the equation.
I also like the general approach of the Motley Fool guys although I haven't spent much time at their site in a couple years.
Summary: to get data from a db to MySQL use PHP to read the db and print out a MySQL script that loads all the data.
It is nice to highlight that you can read lots of different databases using odbc in PHP, but still.
This basic concept is obvious to anyone with familiarity with MySQL. I mean, come on, "pick a language that can read the database in question and use it to dump the data into a format that can be read my MySQL".
This program could have been written in Visual Basic or C# or anything that can read the database you want to convert.
A more interesting PHP program that could have taken *any* two arbitrary odbc databases (MySQL can be accessed through odbc) and dumped table definitions and data from one db to the other.
One really hard part of plans is to catch *all* the things you are going to need to recover. This advice is kinda like the old advice to actually test your backups occasionally.
For example, if you have plans to relocate the headquarters to a different site then every 6 or 12 months so try it out to sort out the "glitches". To expand on this example, does everyone know where the other site is and how to get there? How will they know to go there? Are there problems of quorum, where half the managers will be at one site and half at the other making contradicting decisions? Etc, etc, etc... This is also a good time to learn about how your organization operates.
Whatever your plans and contingencies do regular dry runs of them, to the extent that it is practically possible.
You can either eliminate the piracy or eliminate what is being pirated. :-)
Several years ago when I found myself on an understaffed tightly (insanely) scheduled project I, and several others on the project, read _Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving "Mission Impossible" Projects_ by Edward Yourdon.
/. comments. Basically to know what you are getting into and do it with eyes wide open. There are both reasons to do it (money, foot in the door, etc) and reasons to run away, but your most important time to negotiation is before you say "yes".
Summary from Yourdon's site
I see a lot of Yourdon's advice in these