Check out page 2 of the article, where one of the incriminating emails lists projected salaries and stock options for each of the "partners" in the new company.
They all have the position "partner", but Andrea Horan gets a 60K salary and 50 units while the others all get 150K and from 400 - 4000 units.
Ouch. I'll bet she was pleased to read that in the news.
She's also the only woman on the list... not to jump to conclusions w/o knowing the details, but double-ouch.
Another angle would be to allow authors to block edits of their text, but to allow others to put dissenting links in it pointing their own articles.
I wouldn't do that, because the "author" is not necessarily any more an authority than the dissenters are. And the NPOV thing on Wikipedia is very specific about *not* treating all points of view equally, or letting a very vocal minority make itself seem like an equal player with commonly-accepted ideas.
At the moment, I can't think of a better way they how they do it -- it's not chaos, because they actually do lock down articles that have become wars, and they do include reference to fringe ideas (but clearly label them as fringe).
If you haven't read their bit on the neutral POV, it's very mind-opening stuff; there's no need for the chaos, and there should be no "winner" of the edit war.
Some unfortunate news for you -- even if you found a way to make it fit nicely on your shelf (the strange shape and that puffy handle aren't helping on this one...), black is not an option.
...a *car battery* had sex with a clock radio. That's the lineage I see. Some clunking noises, a blare of static-filled AM talk radio, a drip of battery acid... and a few QA iterations later the creature was born.
The ivory one must look nicer though, right? I only saw a thumbnail of it before I closed the window.
Actually (another poster corrected me on pricing) you wouldn't be able to break 30 euros unless your ride took at least 48 hours. They have a cap of $15 on a 24-hr period.
So once you've figured out that you're taking a ride more than 4 hours (4 and a bit), the clock isn't ticking anymore until the next morning. There are discounts on weekly rates, too, though if you're going to rent a bike for a week you should probably consider other options.
Well, he can "rent" it, move it, and re-lock it for 6 cents. Just moving it wouldn't take more than a minute, right? 6 cents of cost doesn't really make this any different from asking what if you dragged trash from his dumpster in front of the store every night.
If you did it a lot, after a while you'd either get picked up by the police, or he'd get a surveillance camera to bust you.
I think it's actually a pretty neat idea... but the cost is getting up there; 6 cents a minute is a tad expensive; renting a bike for the day could be around 30 bucks (euros?). But the minute-level charge is nice, in that you can also get a bike to just get across town for 60 cents... and you don't have to return the bike to the rental shop.
You must not be involved in business or dealing with the public. That's nice. Here on planet "not living in our parents' basement," we need to let people know what our email address is and have that email address be there for a while.
I use forms on my websites to let people contact me for support or feedback. That has the added bonus of letting me collect their OS and browser versions, which helps when providing support.
That protects me from a lot of spam. For other people, contacts and companies, I usually give each one an email address based on who *they* are. These all funnel into my main account, but I have the option of blocking one of them if it gets released into the wild... hasn't happened yet, though. Lots of people have my email addresses, but I only get 2-3 spams a day (which are easily filtered out), and those are totally from dictionary attacks on my domains, or the email I used to register the domains.
I think the single largest factor is to make sure you don't have your email in plain text anywhere online. If it *is*, find out where and remove it, and your spam level will drop after a few weeks.
Eh, no one's going to see this comment, but this is a favorite topic of mine.:)
I haven't raised a kid yet, but my parents likewise raised me without any physical punishment beyond simple restraint for safety's sake on rare occasions. And who knows what other factors are involved, etc., but I have the longest fuse of anyone I know. I just hardly ever lose my temper. I don't take shit either -- the difference is that I can react to bad behavior in a much smarter way, because I can usually recognize calmly that someone is trying to bully me into a decision I don't like, or whatever, and decide the best way to stop it, without seeing red and doing/saying something stupid out of fury. It's awfully useful. I've seen people get so mad they can't say a damned thing, and they have to walk off (or they blow up, or they wreck their car, or...). I can stay and work it out. And it's funny how quickly things calm down when one of the people in the argument isn't getting mad... the person yelling starts to feel dumb when you don't react, you just wait for them to finish.
If you're a parent and you can do anything to give your kids a long fuse, do it. Hitting them to teach them to behave won't do it. It "works", but it works by inflicting a small trauma on your kid which he associates with whatever -- the argument, you, the shouting, maybe the action you're trying to prevent. Like any trauma, it gets stored in the non-verbal, primal part of his brain (amygdala, I think) where no amount of talk therapy is going to touch it. It get stored there with the various associations as triggers... and when they get tripped, he gets that always-useful fight-or-flight response. This may give him a jolt of panic the next time he reaches for the cookie jar. But it's also going to flood him with adrenaline the next time he's trying to sort out who gets what crayon with his sister, and she shouts at him. The more you cause physical pain to stop him from doing something, the more triggers are added and strengthened.
So what's the alternative? Well, it's definitely harder. My parents quickly figured out that sending me to my room was no good, because that's where I wanted to be. They figured out that taking my book away was much more effective. Basically, you have to get to know your kids (god forbid), find out what they like, and figure out a fair system of punishments and rewards based on that. It's going to be different for every kid. And it's going to take longer for it to really sink in (longer a smack). But I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Unfortunately, it's also much harder to raise your kids this way if *you* were smacked around as a kid, because every time your kid slams a plastic truck on your toe, or hangs on the tablecloth, you're instantly awash in chemicals and ready for battle (*not* a great time to pick a just punishment). So -- plan for it.
Errors in voice dictation result in the _wrong_ word. There are no "illiterate fsck" misspellings unless you actually program them into the vocabulary.
Oh, get over it. An extra "e" on one word. Can't you notice that the rest was funny, and ignore the typo? Besides, "mee" actually *would* be added to the dictionary is some places. It's a word I know, because it means "noodles" in Malay (taken from Mandarin Chinese, I think), and the word is used a lot in English conversation thereabouts. My wife has it added to her Word dictionary.
I have the same problem with work, in that they require a password change every few months.
Like most people, I have a few passwords I use for everything. My work password goes through 4 different ones (Windows won't let you reuse any of the previous few passwords, but it forgets after 4 and you can restart)... but those are just simple keyboard variations on one char, so I don't get lost.
E.g., if my work password were 1*euFId I'd just revolve through 1*euFOd, 1*euFPd, 1*euF{d (just shifting that one character right-wards on the keyboard IOP{). Then start over.
That takes the memory issue out of it, and I don't have to write down that password anywhere.
My other suggestion is to learn passwords *on the keyboard*. Unless you switch DVORAK-QUERTY for some reason, you can just memorize where your fingers go, and a few simple words -- skewed -- can make a pretty tough password. Something that's part real-word, part keyboard pattern, and with the shift key held down somewhere in there (which has the benefit of turning any numbers into special characters) can work really well but still be easy to remember.
Implementation details
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The source for the page is quite simple; most of the work happens in a condensed JavaScript library. Not easy reading (note the word "condensed" above, meaning function and variable names are 1 or 2 chars, and all extra whitespace was removed...), but it's actually pretty straightforward.
It disables your browser's autocomplete on that textfield (for obvious reasons). Then it basically just defines a hidden div for that auto-complete dropdown (variations on this depending on browser... frickin' incompatibilities).
Each time you type a character, it populates that div body with the results of a quick, tiny query back to Google. It's NOT running the search for you; it's hitting (I assume) a simple, probably totally in-memory list of the most popular searches and number of results. That's how it can be so quick a response -- the lookup on their end is super-minimal, and the data to be transferred is probably less than 1k each time.
Cool. Nice concept, nice execution. And one of those nice "only obvious in hindsight" additions.
Even cooler -- it looks like (from the js file) they are supporting multiple languages here, not just English. Anyone using want to test this out for me? I think even Chinese is supported (or maybe that's the one that isn't.. I don't want to take the time to parse this properly).
Until we impress on young minds the fact that cool or uncool makes no difference when you're grown and penniless
An interesting tangent on this -- my wife grew up in Malaysia, and when she was a kid the smartest kids *were* the most popular. No one wanted to hang out with the kids who were doing poorly in their classes, because they weren't cool. Appearance mattered somewhat, too, but was less of a factor. And all the kids she knew *liked* vegetables -- she was totally baffled when she learned about how everyone in the US "knows" that kids just automatically don't like vegetables, need special kids menus with chicken fingers, etc.. None of her friends were like that. Here favorite food growing up was spinach (still is, actually). Yes, I'm totally serious.
Malaysia has problems of their own that seriously hinder education, like blatantly racist policies controlling access to higher education, but the totally different path to "cool" is worth noting. It's NOT automatic that the "nerds" are unpopular (and then never learn proper social skills...), or even that there is some derogatory name for them.
I wish I could follow this up with some good suggestions for fixing this problem... but I'm kind of lost for answers on that one. The first step is at least pointing it out -- then maybe we can work on building better ways for kids to actually use what they learn to do cool stuff; that should help.
(initial comment: many thanks for flagging the large PDF documents clearly as such!)
We get to hear quite a lot from the "industry" side of the music business; it's nice to get a little balance from those "other" people who are also involved in some way with the music business, the actual creators.
I'm not surprised they're split over the issue, personally -- the future of music distribution is not at all a clearcut thing, and even the artists need someone, somewhere to be paying them for their work. Naturally, there are many more solutions that will work for the artists than there are solutions that will work for the industry that has developed purely to advertise and distribute their work through very limited, specific channels...
Quick background -- my main current project is continued develoment on a web-based order entry system for a mid-sized home/garden store chain. Using IBM DB2 for them. I also have a few independant, much smaller online projects (here's the main one), that are using Java/MySql or PHP/MySql.
Live reporting of database information is a different story (reports were probably a bad example). If you want second-by-second data of several types live from a dataset, you'll probably find subqueries very useful.
My experience with reports may not really be the standard one -- I've been working so far always with live reports, hitting live data. I've used temporary tables while doing data-mining-by-hand kind of work, but never in one of the online-available reports.
In the home/garden project I have a report that starts on sales by store in a date range, and you can drill down into the data to see departments within the store, then items within the department; I just have to peel off another layer of subselects on each level of the report, and always apply the date range/dept/store filters on the lowest level, so it doesn't need to work with any more data than necessary. That'd be ugly without subsels.
Kind of a moot point in that case, to be fair, since we aren't considering MySql for that project, but I get into scrapes all the time in my smaller projects just because I forget I don't have multiple levels of group-by... or I just want to use a subselect because it's cleaner, shorter, and easier to maintain, despite being slightly less efficient (which doesn't bother me with a fairly small dataset, especially if I'm smart about limiting the data in the subselect, instead of in the parent select).
BTW -- do you only use temp tables in cases where they're reusable, or is it reasonable to create a one-off temp table for something on the fly? I do that when I have to when I'm doing work by hand, but not yet from an application.
They don't want the subquery that chose the list of customer accounts to report on to change between the AR balance report and the GL report. As a result, the temporary table solution is perfect.
Here you're talking about tables that are probably just repopulated daily, right? That's a great idea... I get jumpy about maintaining totals tables, that sort of thing (it's kind of anti-normalization, and can be hard to maintain w/ triggers or in the app), but just taking the most useful cut(s) of the data and putting it into one big table every night could be very useful. I've been assuming that data a day stale wouldn't work for my customer, but it's worth asking.:)
I meta-modded your post as interesting, because in some applications it's true (and it's essential not to use subselects as a crutch if you don't understand the different joins), but overall I have to disagree -- there are just too many applications where I couldn't even consider MySql (3.x) because of the lack of subqueries. Any kind of reporting is damned hard without subqueries, especially if you want to reuse common subqueries in your code when you're building multiple reports with some common parts. Sure, you can use temporary tables... but you can't keep them, because you're reporting on changing data, and every report is requested with different parameters....
Even worse in my opinion, just opening a console to quickly get some data out of the database is much, much harder without subqueries. I have a few simple web applications running against MySql 3.x (trying to get my host to upgrade...), and I always start cursing when I want to do something like list the accounts with more than 100 orders, or something like that (fake simple example; I'm not that successful).
select account_id, the_count from (
select count(order_id)
from order
group by account_id ) as sub where the_count > 100
There's no simple, one-step way to do that w/o the subquery that comes to mind... and if you need to add a group-by on the upper level (like if you want to also display the last-used shipping address) you're really hosed.
These guys were caught because of stupidity and greed.
They were in the building, pulling cards that were in active use, for about TWO HOURS. According to the article they arrived around 8pm, and the police didn't get a report that there might be a problem at that building until 9:51. Sometime after that, the police car arrived at the building, where they caught the guys walking out.
It makes me wonder about how much more successful an intelligent thief could be -- these guys made an earlier hit on the same building, which went smoothly (and they took much less)... so they got greedy and overconfident. And paid for it by getting caught in a stupid way (um, these boards are in use; people's phone service *will* be affected; no, you don't want to hang around all night).
Don't these guys watch any movies? How classic is that mistake?
With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work.
This should read "...since Alpha 4, A5 contains some..."
I don't use the Mozilla suite anymore (moved to Firefox), but the Gecko improvements will of course end up in Firefox as well, so it's all good. Time to browse over to the roadmap to figure out how that development path actually works nowadays...
I jumped over to the Progeny Linux website and found no mention of much of anything useful... you click on Products and Services and they just mention they provide security fixes for old RedHat distros. Okay... Here's their actual download page for the ISOs, and the distro description page. It mentions a bit more about what you're getting -- for one, this is RC-1 (not the release yet). More detail:
Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition aims to provide an unmatched "out of the box" environment for software developers building applications for the Java, Mono/.NET and LAMP platforms. Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition also serves as a showcase for Componentized Linux and includes all Componentized Linux technologies. As such, it is also an excellent development platform for builders of Componentized Linux based custom distributions.
I'm probably going to try it out (I'm a Java and LAMP developer..); I might wait for the release, though.
If users become comfortable, in small steps, with open source software, that could be the beginning of a migration.
Right on -- it's more a psychological thing than anything else. The internet is THE killer app for home users. It's why Grandma and Aunt Bee are getting computers. In the past, the "face" of the internet has been IE.
Once the Internet looks like a little fox wrapped around a globe, it's psychologically a much smaller step to switch from Windows to an alternative, less expensive operating system next time they're shopping for a new PC.
"I don't know, that start up screen looks different... but oh, here's my internet. I know this part. It's exactly the same, and not some kind of shady knockoff! So why would I pay more for that other computer? My grandkids keep telling me that one has spam and ads, and it spies on me."
Also, FUD tactics against OSS will be less effective as more people are very familiar with a piece of high-quality, open source software.
That's a good point, though I've seen enough bad code to say that errors like this actually COULD make it out -- there's a shocking number of developers out there who just make changes until it "works"... even if they're still broken code being executed (in PHP you just put an "@" in front of any function call to suppress errors, and people DO this so they can keep working without sorting out the problem!). You see multiple attempts to do the same thing, and only ONE of them actually does it. Ugh.
I think being married is great. Granted, I've only been hitched so far for a bit more than 4 years, but we were already practically married for another 5 years before that (unquestionably monogamous).
I'm a much more social person now that I'm married, actually -- the pressure's off! It's so much easier to hang out with and meet new people (male or female) now that I'm "taken", and don't need to be forever trying to figure out what people (well, women, esp.) are thinking of me, plus I have a safe zone to retreat to if I'm not clicking with anyone there (i.e., we just talk to each other). And because I'm much more confortable dealing with people now, I'm probably more fun to be around. I tell jokes better, now that I can concentrate on telling the joke well, instead of trying to scan faces to see "how I'm doing".
I dunno -- of course there are downsides to anything (I have to keep the flirting within safe limits... but hey, that's pretty manageable), but as long as we both get our alone time, and remember that neither of us can tell the other what to do, ever, it all works out pretty well. We both decided from the start that no repeated nagging is allowed, ever (that's a form of "forcing" someone to do something). When we have problems we sort them out and move on. We keep separate bank accounts, since our bill paying approaches differ widely. And interestingly, our dog is pretty effective at stopping us from getting into emotional arguments -- whenever our voices start rising (even if we're agreeing about something we're pissed off at...) she gets *terribly* worried and starts climbing in our laps and licking. It's pretty funny, so it tends to defuse things.
it's not languages that are insecure; no matter what language you use, you need to have competent programmers.
Well, you're right that you *do* need competent programmers to build a secure system, no matter what language you are using. You're wrong on your first point, though. PHP and Java both run in interpreters -- that's software which *itself* can have exploitable flaws.
Language design also does make a difference in security. Even if all interpreters and runtimes were perfectly secure (they're not, and PHP in particular still has a lot of maturing to do), you still have a level of "gotchas" that a programmer must know to avoid for their site to be secure.
Java *and* PHP, for example, are designed so that buffer overflows are impossible. All of the buffer overflow exploits that keep showing up in even well-designed software like Apache... those are a hugely dangerous gotcha because the level of careful, intelligent programming required to avoid them is very high for complex software.
Alas, PHP has features designed to make programming quick and easy that also introduce lots of gotchas, like the loose-typing. You can take random input from the user, like $username = $_POST['username'], and execute that *inputted text* like a function if you screw up and put extra parentheses after it:
$other_var = $username();
You make that mistake, and an external user can call any function they want, just by tinkering with the username field. They are gotchas in any language, but the ones in Java are more likely to break your code logic, NOT to give lots of power where you didn't mean it (thanks to the integrated security model and strict typing). I've only been learning PHP for about a week now, and I've already noticed a bunch... so I don't really know the full extent, but of course a more "flexible" language will have more of them.
My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.
That's not the greatest example, since they were using the machine as instructed. It's more like if your Isuzu had no gas gauge, but a little gray light that would *occasionally* blink on and off again when you got down near empty, and when you hit empty the engine would fall out.
One can argue that you should have known that would happen (it was in the instruction manual!), but it's also a blazingly poor design. Warning systems should be commensurate with the risk involved. They wouldn't need to install a siren... how about just not *accepting* votes it couldn't *record*?
I don't know that litigation is the best answer (possibly just good publicity is all that's needed to stop this happening again, and possibly put the company out of business)... but the amount of blame the county deserves for getting the cheaper model strikes me as pretty tiny. Do you want to live in a pure "caveat emptor" world where you have to fully understand the tech behind every product you buy -- or get royally screwed, and then blamed for it?
They are fully functional transporter pads. The only problem is that he has the only ones, and his remote targetting system isn't done yet, so when you hop on and he fires it up, the computer can only lock onto... the same pads.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out page 2 of the article, where one of the incriminating emails lists projected salaries and stock options for each of the "partners" in the new company.
They all have the position "partner", but Andrea Horan gets a 60K salary and 50 units while the others all get 150K and from 400 - 4000 units.
Ouch. I'll bet she was pleased to read that in the news.
She's also the only woman on the list... not to jump to conclusions w/o knowing the details, but double-ouch.
Another angle would be to allow authors to block edits of their text, but to allow others to put dissenting links in it pointing their own articles.
I wouldn't do that, because the "author" is not necessarily any more an authority than the dissenters are. And the NPOV thing on Wikipedia is very specific about *not* treating all points of view equally, or letting a very vocal minority make itself seem like an equal player with commonly-accepted ideas.
At the moment, I can't think of a better way they how they do it -- it's not chaos, because they actually do lock down articles that have become wars, and they do include reference to fringe ideas (but clearly label them as fringe).
If you haven't read their bit on the neutral POV, it's very mind-opening stuff; there's no need for the chaos, and there should be no "winner" of the edit war.
black, with a colored LED-ish LCD panel
Some unfortunate news for you -- even if you found a way to make it fit nicely on your shelf (the strange shape and that puffy handle aren't helping on this one...), black is not an option.
That's "Starry Blue".
...a *car battery* had sex with a clock radio. That's the lineage I see. Some clunking noises, a blare of static-filled AM talk radio, a drip of battery acid... and a few QA iterations later the creature was born.
The ivory one must look nicer though, right? I only saw a thumbnail of it before I closed the window.
Actually (another poster corrected me on pricing) you wouldn't be able to break 30 euros unless your ride took at least 48 hours. They have a cap of $15 on a 24-hr period.
So once you've figured out that you're taking a ride more than 4 hours (4 and a bit), the clock isn't ticking anymore until the next morning. There are discounts on weekly rates, too, though if you're going to rent a bike for a week you should probably consider other options.
Uh, I've been to Berlin. Getting across that "town" at 6c/minute on a bike would cost you good 20-30 euro if you can ride really fast.
Yeah, yeah... sheesh. Try "...to get somewhere that's a 10-minute bike ride, but more than an hour's walk, for 60 cents".
Happy now?
Well, he can "rent" it, move it, and re-lock it for 6 cents. Just moving it wouldn't take more than a minute, right? 6 cents of cost doesn't really make this any different from asking what if you dragged trash from his dumpster in front of the store every night.
If you did it a lot, after a while you'd either get picked up by the police, or he'd get a surveillance camera to bust you.
I think it's actually a pretty neat idea... but the cost is getting up there; 6 cents a minute is a tad expensive; renting a bike for the day could be around 30 bucks (euros?). But the minute-level charge is nice, in that you can also get a bike to just get across town for 60 cents... and you don't have to return the bike to the rental shop.
You must not be involved in business or dealing with the public. That's nice. Here on planet "not living in our parents' basement," we need to let people know what our email address is and have that email address be there for a while.
I use forms on my websites to let people contact me for support or feedback. That has the added bonus of letting me collect their OS and browser versions, which helps when providing support.
That protects me from a lot of spam. For other people, contacts and companies, I usually give each one an email address based on who *they* are. These all funnel into my main account, but I have the option of blocking one of them if it gets released into the wild... hasn't happened yet, though. Lots of people have my email addresses, but I only get 2-3 spams a day (which are easily filtered out), and those are totally from dictionary attacks on my domains, or the email I used to register the domains.
I think the single largest factor is to make sure you don't have your email in plain text anywhere online. If it *is*, find out where and remove it, and your spam level will drop after a few weeks.
Eh, no one's going to see this comment, but this is a favorite topic of mine. :)
I haven't raised a kid yet, but my parents likewise raised me without any physical punishment beyond simple restraint for safety's sake on rare occasions. And who knows what other factors are involved, etc., but I have the longest fuse of anyone I know. I just hardly ever lose my temper. I don't take shit either -- the difference is that I can react to bad behavior in a much smarter way, because I can usually recognize calmly that someone is trying to bully me into a decision I don't like, or whatever, and decide the best way to stop it, without seeing red and doing/saying something stupid out of fury. It's awfully useful. I've seen people get so mad they can't say a damned thing, and they have to walk off (or they blow up, or they wreck their car, or...). I can stay and work it out. And it's funny how quickly things calm down when one of the people in the argument isn't getting mad... the person yelling starts to feel dumb when you don't react, you just wait for them to finish.
If you're a parent and you can do anything to give your kids a long fuse, do it. Hitting them to teach them to behave won't do it. It "works", but it works by inflicting a small trauma on your kid which he associates with whatever -- the argument, you, the shouting, maybe the action you're trying to prevent. Like any trauma, it gets stored in the non-verbal, primal part of his brain (amygdala, I think) where no amount of talk therapy is going to touch it. It get stored there with the various associations as triggers... and when they get tripped, he gets that always-useful fight-or-flight response. This may give him a jolt of panic the next time he reaches for the cookie jar. But it's also going to flood him with adrenaline the next time he's trying to sort out who gets what crayon with his sister, and she shouts at him. The more you cause physical pain to stop him from doing something, the more triggers are added and strengthened.
So what's the alternative? Well, it's definitely harder. My parents quickly figured out that sending me to my room was no good, because that's where I wanted to be. They figured out that taking my book away was much more effective. Basically, you have to get to know your kids (god forbid), find out what they like, and figure out a fair system of punishments and rewards based on that. It's going to be different for every kid. And it's going to take longer for it to really sink in (longer a smack). But I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Unfortunately, it's also much harder to raise your kids this way if *you* were smacked around as a kid, because every time your kid slams a plastic truck on your toe, or hangs on the tablecloth, you're instantly awash in chemicals and ready for battle (*not* a great time to pick a just punishment). So -- plan for it.
It walks just fin four mee!
Errors in voice dictation result in the _wrong_ word. There are no "illiterate fsck" misspellings unless you actually program them into the vocabulary.
Oh, get over it. An extra "e" on one word. Can't you notice that the rest was funny, and ignore the typo? Besides, "mee" actually *would* be added to the dictionary is some places. It's a word I know, because it means "noodles" in Malay (taken from Mandarin Chinese, I think), and the word is used a lot in English conversation thereabouts. My wife has it added to her Word dictionary.
I have the same problem with work, in that they require a password change every few months.
Like most people, I have a few passwords I use for everything. My work password goes through 4 different ones (Windows won't let you reuse any of the previous few passwords, but it forgets after 4 and you can restart)... but those are just simple keyboard variations on one char, so I don't get lost.
E.g., if my work password were 1*euFId I'd just revolve through 1*euFOd, 1*euFPd, 1*euF{d (just shifting that one character right-wards on the keyboard IOP{). Then start over.
That takes the memory issue out of it, and I don't have to write down that password anywhere.
My other suggestion is to learn passwords *on the keyboard*. Unless you switch DVORAK-QUERTY for some reason, you can just memorize where your fingers go, and a few simple words -- skewed -- can make a pretty tough password. Something that's part real-word, part keyboard pattern, and with the shift key held down somewhere in there (which has the benefit of turning any numbers into special characters) can work really well but still be easy to remember.
The source for the page is quite simple; most of the work happens in a condensed JavaScript library. Not easy reading (note the word "condensed" above, meaning function and variable names are 1 or 2 chars, and all extra whitespace was removed...), but it's actually pretty straightforward.
It disables your browser's autocomplete on that textfield (for obvious reasons). Then it basically just defines a hidden div for that auto-complete dropdown (variations on this depending on browser... frickin' incompatibilities).
Each time you type a character, it populates that div body with the results of a quick, tiny query back to Google. It's NOT running the search for you; it's hitting (I assume) a simple, probably totally in-memory list of the most popular searches and number of results. That's how it can be so quick a response -- the lookup on their end is super-minimal, and the data to be transferred is probably less than 1k each time.
Cool. Nice concept, nice execution. And one of those nice "only obvious in hindsight" additions.
Even cooler -- it looks like (from the js file) they are supporting multiple languages here, not just English. Anyone using want to test this out for me? I think even Chinese is supported (or maybe that's the one that isn't.. I don't want to take the time to parse this properly).
Until we impress on young minds the fact that cool or uncool makes no difference when you're grown and penniless
An interesting tangent on this -- my wife grew up in Malaysia, and when she was a kid the smartest kids *were* the most popular. No one wanted to hang out with the kids who were doing poorly in their classes, because they weren't cool. Appearance mattered somewhat, too, but was less of a factor. And all the kids she knew *liked* vegetables -- she was totally baffled when she learned about how everyone in the US "knows" that kids just automatically don't like vegetables, need special kids menus with chicken fingers, etc.. None of her friends were like that. Here favorite food growing up was spinach (still is, actually). Yes, I'm totally serious.
Malaysia has problems of their own that seriously hinder education, like blatantly racist policies controlling access to higher education, but the totally different path to "cool" is worth noting. It's NOT automatic that the "nerds" are unpopular (and then never learn proper social skills...), or even that there is some derogatory name for them.
I wish I could follow this up with some good suggestions for fixing this problem... but I'm kind of lost for answers on that one. The first step is at least pointing it out -- then maybe we can work on building better ways for kids to actually use what they learn to do cool stuff; that should help.
(initial comment: many thanks for flagging the large PDF documents clearly as such!)
We get to hear quite a lot from the "industry" side of the music business; it's nice to get a little balance from those "other" people who are also involved in some way with the music business, the actual creators.
I'm not surprised they're split over the issue, personally -- the future of music distribution is not at all a clearcut thing, and even the artists need someone, somewhere to be paying them for their work. Naturally, there are many more solutions that will work for the artists than there are solutions that will work for the industry that has developed purely to advertise and distribute their work through very limited, specific channels...
Quick background -- my main current project is continued develoment on a web-based order entry system for a mid-sized home/garden store chain. Using IBM DB2 for them. I also have a few independant, much smaller online projects (here's the main one), that are using Java/MySql or PHP/MySql.
:)
Live reporting of database information is a different story (reports were probably a bad example). If you want second-by-second data of several types live from a dataset, you'll probably find subqueries very useful.
My experience with reports may not really be the standard one -- I've been working so far always with live reports, hitting live data. I've used temporary tables while doing data-mining-by-hand kind of work, but never in one of the online-available reports.
In the home/garden project I have a report that starts on sales by store in a date range, and you can drill down into the data to see departments within the store, then items within the department; I just have to peel off another layer of subselects on each level of the report, and always apply the date range/dept/store filters on the lowest level, so it doesn't need to work with any more data than necessary. That'd be ugly without subsels.
Kind of a moot point in that case, to be fair, since we aren't considering MySql for that project, but I get into scrapes all the time in my smaller projects just because I forget I don't have multiple levels of group-by... or I just want to use a subselect because it's cleaner, shorter, and easier to maintain, despite being slightly less efficient (which doesn't bother me with a fairly small dataset, especially if I'm smart about limiting the data in the subselect, instead of in the parent select).
BTW -- do you only use temp tables in cases where they're reusable, or is it reasonable to create a one-off temp table for something on the fly? I do that when I have to when I'm doing work by hand, but not yet from an application.
They don't want the subquery that chose the list of customer accounts to report on to change between the AR balance report and the GL report. As a result, the temporary table solution is perfect.
Here you're talking about tables that are probably just repopulated daily, right? That's a great idea... I get jumpy about maintaining totals tables, that sort of thing (it's kind of anti-normalization, and can be hard to maintain w/ triggers or in the app), but just taking the most useful cut(s) of the data and putting it into one big table every night could be very useful. I've been assuming that data a day stale wouldn't work for my customer, but it's worth asking.
I meta-modded your post as interesting, because in some applications it's true (and it's essential not to use subselects as a crutch if you don't understand the different joins), but overall I have to disagree -- there are just too many applications where I couldn't even consider MySql (3.x) because of the lack of subqueries. Any kind of reporting is damned hard without subqueries, especially if you want to reuse common subqueries in your code when you're building multiple reports with some common parts. Sure, you can use temporary tables... but you can't keep them, because you're reporting on changing data, and every report is requested with different parameters....
Even worse in my opinion, just opening a console to quickly get some data out of the database is much, much harder without subqueries. I have a few simple web applications running against MySql 3.x (trying to get my host to upgrade...), and I always start cursing when I want to do something like list the accounts with more than 100 orders, or something like that (fake simple example; I'm not that successful).
select account_id, the_count
from (
select count(order_id)
from order
group by account_id
) as sub
where the_count > 100
There's no simple, one-step way to do that w/o the subquery that comes to mind... and if you need to add a group-by on the upper level (like if you want to also display the last-used shipping address) you're really hosed.
These guys were caught because of stupidity and greed.
They were in the building, pulling cards that were in active use, for about TWO HOURS. According to the article they arrived around 8pm, and the police didn't get a report that there might be a problem at that building until 9:51. Sometime after that, the police car arrived at the building, where they caught the guys walking out.
It makes me wonder about how much more successful an intelligent thief could be -- these guys made an earlier hit on the same building, which went smoothly (and they took much less)... so they got greedy and overconfident. And paid for it by getting caught in a stupid way (um, these boards are in use; people's phone service *will* be affected; no, you don't want to hang around all night).
Don't these guys watch any movies? How classic is that mistake?
With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work.
This should read "...since Alpha 4, A5 contains some..."
I don't use the Mozilla suite anymore (moved to Firefox), but the Gecko improvements will of course end up in Firefox as well, so it's all good. Time to browse over to the roadmap to figure out how that development path actually works nowadays...
Here's their actual download page for the ISOs, and the distro description page. It mentions a bit more about what you're getting -- for one, this is RC-1 (not the release yet). More detail: I'm probably going to try it out (I'm a Java and LAMP developer..); I might wait for the release, though.
If users become comfortable, in small steps, with open source software, that could be the beginning of a migration.
Right on -- it's more a psychological thing than anything else. The internet is THE killer app for home users. It's why Grandma and Aunt Bee are getting computers. In the past, the "face" of the internet has been IE.
Once the Internet looks like a little fox wrapped around a globe, it's psychologically a much smaller step to switch from Windows to an alternative, less expensive operating system next time they're shopping for a new PC.
"I don't know, that start up screen looks different... but oh, here's my internet. I know this part. It's exactly the same, and not some kind of shady knockoff! So why would I pay more for that other computer? My grandkids keep telling me that one has spam and ads, and it spies on me."
Also, FUD tactics against OSS will be less effective as more people are very familiar with a piece of high-quality, open source software.
That's a good point, though I've seen enough bad code to say that errors like this actually COULD make it out -- there's a shocking number of developers out there who just make changes until it "works"... even if they're still broken code being executed (in PHP you just put an "@" in front of any function call to suppress errors, and people DO this so they can keep working without sorting out the problem!). You see multiple attempts to do the same thing, and only ONE of them actually does it. Ugh.
That's back to incompetent programmers, though..
Here's a better review of security issues in PHP, with much better examples than I had. I'm out of my areas of expertise....
I think being married is great. Granted, I've only been hitched so far for a bit more than 4 years, but we were already practically married for another 5 years before that (unquestionably monogamous).
I'm a much more social person now that I'm married, actually -- the pressure's off! It's so much easier to hang out with and meet new people (male or female) now that I'm "taken", and don't need to be forever trying to figure out what people (well, women, esp.) are thinking of me, plus I have a safe zone to retreat to if I'm not clicking with anyone there (i.e., we just talk to each other). And because I'm much more confortable dealing with people now, I'm probably more fun to be around. I tell jokes better, now that I can concentrate on telling the joke well, instead of trying to scan faces to see "how I'm doing".
I dunno -- of course there are downsides to anything (I have to keep the flirting within safe limits... but hey, that's pretty manageable), but as long as we both get our alone time, and remember that neither of us can tell the other what to do, ever, it all works out pretty well. We both decided from the start that no repeated nagging is allowed, ever (that's a form of "forcing" someone to do something). When we have problems we sort them out and move on. We keep separate bank accounts, since our bill paying approaches differ widely. And interestingly, our dog is pretty effective at stopping us from getting into emotional arguments -- whenever our voices start rising (even if we're agreeing about something we're pissed off at...) she gets *terribly* worried and starts climbing in our laps and licking. It's pretty funny, so it tends to defuse things.
Just one man's experience...
it's not languages that are insecure; no matter what language you use, you need to have competent programmers.
Well, you're right that you *do* need competent programmers to build a secure system, no matter what language you are using. You're wrong on your first point, though. PHP and Java both run in interpreters -- that's software which *itself* can have exploitable flaws.
Language design also does make a difference in security. Even if all interpreters and runtimes were perfectly secure (they're not, and PHP in particular still has a lot of maturing to do), you still have a level of "gotchas" that a programmer must know to avoid for their site to be secure.
Java *and* PHP, for example, are designed so that buffer overflows are impossible. All of the buffer overflow exploits that keep showing up in even well-designed software like Apache... those are a hugely dangerous gotcha because the level of careful, intelligent programming required to avoid them is very high for complex software.
Alas, PHP has features designed to make programming quick and easy that also introduce lots of gotchas, like the loose-typing. You can take random input from the user, like $username = $_POST['username'], and execute that *inputted text* like a function if you screw up and put extra parentheses after it:
$other_var = $username();
You make that mistake, and an external user can call any function they want, just by tinkering with the username field. They are gotchas in any language, but the ones in Java are more likely to break your code logic, NOT to give lots of power where you didn't mean it (thanks to the integrated security model and strict typing). I've only been learning PHP for about a week now, and I've already noticed a bunch... so I don't really know the full extent, but of course a more "flexible" language will have more of them.
My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.
That's not the greatest example, since they were using the machine as instructed. It's more like if your Isuzu had no gas gauge, but a little gray light that would *occasionally* blink on and off again when you got down near empty, and when you hit empty the engine would fall out.
One can argue that you should have known that would happen (it was in the instruction manual!), but it's also a blazingly poor design. Warning systems should be commensurate with the risk involved. They wouldn't need to install a siren... how about just not *accepting* votes it couldn't *record*?
I don't know that litigation is the best answer (possibly just good publicity is all that's needed to stop this happening again, and possibly put the company out of business)... but the amount of blame the county deserves for getting the cheaper model strikes me as pretty tiny. Do you want to live in a pure "caveat emptor" world where you have to fully understand the tech behind every product you buy -- or get royally screwed, and then blamed for it?
They are fully functional transporter pads. The only problem is that he has the only ones, and his remote targetting system isn't done yet, so when you hop on and he fires it up, the computer can only lock onto... the same pads.
And there you are. Instantly!!