You can't predict credit risk based on phone usage. There are far too many system inputs to even begin to separate this kind of data. You might as well argue that you can predict credit risk based on television viewing habits or toothbrush selection.
And every time I hear one of these anecdotal stories of women being viciously attacked, I think to myself "Whoa. I've never seen anything like that." And inevitably, it ends with "this bad shit happens because you're remaining silent while it happens." And I think "Huh. Well there's not much I can do to stop what I've never seen happen."
The thing is, I have no idea how much of a problem this is really. Are people overreacting? Are people really behaving like that? Are there even very many of them? Does it happen to women more than men? Much more? Does it happen more in tech circles than, say, artist circles?
I don't have time to dig up all of that myself, and it's not affecting me negatively in any way. It's not my fight, so there's no point in my "doing something about it", unless a problem were to suddenly stare me in the face (witnessing harassment, for example). I suspect that most people fall into this category.
So by publicly berating everyone in a group for their "lack of action" to curb this scourge, you're simply alienating everyone except for those who want to put on a public show of their righteousness.
A friend of mine is one of those "bad boys". He's usually doing two different married women at any point in his life.
He likes married women because they don't try to tie him down (it's just a fling, after all), and they eventually move on, leaving him free to find someone else. Meanwhile, they have an outlet for all their repressed emotions and fantasies, which he's happy to oblige for some truly amazing sex.
These women are people whom you'd NEVER suspect of cheating. There is quite literally no way of knowing, unless she gets careless.
It's called AMT, and I've been running one of these for over a year on my $120 vPro motherboard. As of AMT 6.0, you can control every aspect of the pc, including interacting with the bios screen, from remote.
Foolishness is foolishness, whether it be the idea of personalities (souls) persisting in energy form, an omniscient being telling sheep herders how to live, or space aliens trolling the weak minded with peek-a-boo tricks and anal probes.
Just because a lot of people persist in a fantasy doesn't make it real, and it is the responsibility of all level headed people to ridicule them so that they'll eventually be shamed into being less ignorant and foolish.
Silly practices like commenting every line of code, no matter how pointless:
// create counting variable and initialize it to 0
int count = 0;// create a variable
int a;// create b variable
int b;// loop
do
{// get result of a_func
a = a_func();// get result of b_func
b = b_func();// print the product
printf("%d\n", (a*b));
}// loop until counter is 10
while count
The problem is not just a lack in teaching; it's a lack in thought on the part of the taught as well. When you churn out drones, they tend to act like drones.
Kinda like the tag parser in slashdot, which can't tell the difference between an end tag and a double-slash comment, swallowing a newline instead and screwing up the code section above. Ever hear of bison, guys?
And careful observers who have actually READ the article will notice that it is specifically about the book, saying quite plainly that possession of the Anarchist's Cookbook is a crime.
Now you have to somehow fill that garbage location with code. How are you going to do that, except with another exploit? And if you've got an exploit to insert your own code into execution memory, why bother with a dangling pointer at all?
The only way you're going to exploit a dangling pointer is if it happens to point to a memory location whose contents you can overwrite by some other means. That's a highly unlikely scenario.
1. generate a bunch of new sessions to the login page. 2. Identify samples that appear more often than others. 3. Recognize the handwriting style. 4. Log in.
I was at the Vancouver showing. I've done a lot of smoke and mirror shows myself, and this demo did not smell funny at all.
The headline "Scientists Dubious of Quantum Claims" is rather sensationalist for what they're actually saying in the article. Can you really fault them for not wanting to move a computer that has to be housed in a special chamber, cooled to near absolute zero, and be havily shielded from any outside interference? Besides, judging by the questions people asked, not a single person in the audience could have verified that it was a computer and not a big refrigerator.
What I saw were a group of really smart people who are onto something real, and need to drum up enthusiasm for a later release of their product. Their machine appeared to do what they claimed it did, and while it is quite easy to fake it, I didn't get such an impression at the demo.
Isn't it kind of obvious when someone's personal life is interfering with their professional life? Is it so hard to take the cue from the rest of the world, where such nonsense is not even considered (with no apparent ill effects)?
While you can bash the tools as much as you want, the point remains that the majority of the fault for bad programs lies with the programmer.
Just as an adept sculptor can build a beautiful (though somewhat rough) art piece using a chainsaw, so can a good programmer make do in situations where he is forced to use the wrong tool for the job.
Namespaces can be simulated with a good naming convention. OO can be accomplished in a procedural language. Technologies can be married together, and even replaced in part with other technologies at a later date (it's called refactoring, folks!)
I currently program exclusively in Java. I learned from the ground up (Analog electronics -> Digital logic -> Machine code & Assembly -> C -> C++ -> other OO languages & scripting languages, AOP etc)
I'd love to have multiple inheritance in Java, but I hate the fact that you can't rebind a reference in C++. I'd love to have real properties and closures supported by the Java language proper, but I make do with standardized boilerplate code in the meantime. I love the quick UI building you can do in VB, but I certainly wouldn't want to write business logic with it! Access is great for building quick and simple systems, and does its job well, but I'm not going to store 10 million records in it! Nothing beats the speed of a library written in assembler, but I'm certainly not going to write database access code in it! Perl is a great tool in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it is the worst disaster ever, and the first thing I get rid of when I take over support of a project (except for 10% of the time when the previous programmer was competent).
I've seen horrendous code in every language I've ever encountered, and it's always a result of the programmer not understanding what he's working with. My personal opinion is that you shouldn't be programming unless you understand at least one layer below where you're working.
Do you know how to examine a core dump? How about interpreting a Java HotSpot dump? Do you understand how the technology you're working with interacts with the operating system? Do you know how the auto-code generator deep within the script overlay you're using actually works? Have you even once looked at the intermediate output? How about the.S files created by your compiler? Do you even know what they are? Could you load an object file into a disassembler? What will you do when something goes wrong with it? Give up?
Do you follow the generally accepted practices used in your domain? Do you even know what they are? Do you know what domain driven design is? Do you understand when it's a bad idea to use inheritance? (Answer: most of the time)
I could go on forever. The point is that good programmers find the right tool for the job because they understand how it all works. Hackers do it fast, but forget to make it readable or maintainable. Bad programmers just plain do a bad job and make things shitty for everyone.
If this guy had even bothered to look online at what AJAX is today, he'd realize that there are frameworks such as Echo2 http://www.nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/ that make writing AJAX applications no more complicated than writing Swing apps.
AJAX is happening because there's nobody willing to take the lead in Web 2.0.
1. Download Echo2 http://nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/ 2. Write AJAX applications like you would a Swing app, never touching HTML or Javascript. 3. Go outside and play.
The thing to remember about automated code inspectors is: be smart about it.
Don't trust the code inspector to enforce a policy (except maybe coding style).
There's a lot of boilerplate code that goes into a program, and a code duplication monitor will cause all sorts of headaches in this area.
The same problem exists with comment checkers. If code is written properly, there is usually very little need to comment inside most methods. The name and javadoc will give more than enough description of what the method will do (you DO use javadoc, don't you?) It's only as the method's complexity increases to a point where it's not blatantly obvious what's going on inside that you need comments at that level.
I've had too many managers force me to comment like this:
// Iterate over all files for(Iterator iter = files.iterator(); iter.hasNext();/* nothing to do here */) {// Get the next file
File file = (File)iter.next();// If the file has a modification date later than now
if(file.lastModified() > new Date().getTime())
{// Throw an exception stating that the file is modified in the future
throw new ModifiedInFutureException(file.toString() " + has a modification date in the future");
} }
Ok it looks much uglier after running through Slashdot's dumb filter, but you get the idea.
The above code in reality needs no comments whatsoever, except perhaps a single line at the top saying "Disallow modification dates in the future", but a bad policy caused ALL code checked in to comply with silly regulations, resulting in countless hours lost.
In truth, the date check code itself should have been implemented as a policy class to be added to the verify method, but I digress.
My DoCoMo phone has had barcode scanning available to it for YEARS.
A few years ago, they added the ability to scan those 2D "barcodes", and they're everywhere in Japan. You scan the code, and it forwards your phone to a promotional website.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't predict credit risk based on phone usage. There are far too many system inputs to even begin to separate this kind of data. You might as well argue that you can predict credit risk based on television viewing habits or toothbrush selection.
And every time I hear one of these anecdotal stories of women being viciously attacked, I think to myself "Whoa. I've never seen anything like that."
And inevitably, it ends with "this bad shit happens because you're remaining silent while it happens."
And I think "Huh. Well there's not much I can do to stop what I've never seen happen."
The thing is, I have no idea how much of a problem this is really. Are people overreacting? Are people really behaving like that? Are there even very many of them? Does it happen to women more than men? Much more? Does it happen more in tech circles than, say, artist circles?
I don't have time to dig up all of that myself, and it's not affecting me negatively in any way. It's not my fight, so there's no point in my "doing something about it", unless a problem were to suddenly stare me in the face (witnessing harassment, for example). I suspect that most people fall into this category.
So by publicly berating everyone in a group for their "lack of action" to curb this scourge, you're simply alienating everyone except for those who want to put on a public show of their righteousness.
A friend of mine is one of those "bad boys". He's usually doing two different married women at any point in his life.
He likes married women because they don't try to tie him down (it's just a fling, after all), and they eventually move on, leaving him free to find someone else. Meanwhile, they have an outlet for all their repressed emotions and fantasies, which he's happy to oblige for some truly amazing sex.
These women are people whom you'd NEVER suspect of cheating. There is quite literally no way of knowing, unless she gets careless.
It's called AMT, and I've been running one of these for over a year on my $120 vPro motherboard.
As of AMT 6.0, you can control every aspect of the pc, including interacting with the bios screen, from remote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology
I'm one to judge.
Foolishness is foolishness, whether it be the idea of personalities (souls) persisting in energy form, an omniscient being telling sheep herders how to live, or space aliens trolling the weak minded with peek-a-boo tricks and anal probes.
Just because a lot of people persist in a fantasy doesn't make it real, and it is the responsibility of all level headed people to ridicule them so that they'll eventually be shamed into being less ignorant and foolish.
And it certainly didn't stop everyone from blaming it on "evil spirits".
Just because you didn't find a natural cause doesn't mean you're not being foolish.
Silly practices like commenting every line of code, no matter how pointless:
// create counting variable and initialize it to 0 // create a variable // create b variable // loop // get result of a_func // get result of b_func // print the product // loop until counter is 10
int count = 0;
int a;
int b;
do
{
a = a_func();
b = b_func();
printf("%d\n", (a*b));
}
while count
The problem is not just a lack in teaching; it's a lack in thought on the part of the taught as well. When you churn out drones, they tend to act like drones.
Kinda like the tag parser in slashdot, which can't tell the difference between an end tag and a double-slash comment, swallowing a newline instead and screwing up the code section above. Ever hear of bison, guys?
And careful observers who have actually READ the article will notice that it is specifically about the book, saying quite plainly that possession of the Anarchist's Cookbook is a crime.
Read the article.
Quote:
The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.
The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.
#1 can be interpreted two ways.
#2 means that mere possession of information is a crime.
This is essentially the establishment of a thought crime.
The best way to protest this is to print out a bunch of copies, and then set up a booth outside the courthouse giving them away for free.
Great, so you find a dangling pointer. So what?
Now you have to somehow fill that garbage location with code. How are you going to do that, except with another exploit? And if you've got an exploit to insert your own code into execution memory, why bother with a dangling pointer at all?
The only way you're going to exploit a dangling pointer is if it happens to point to a memory location whose contents you can overwrite by some other means. That's a highly unlikely scenario.
Here's how you crack it:
1. generate a bunch of new sessions to the login page.
2. Identify samples that appear more often than others.
3. Recognize the handwriting style.
4. Log in.
Have a look here: http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/raid-lvm.php
Raid5 + LVM allowed me to use different sized disks and create a fully redundant array of the whole thing and have it appear as a single volume.
If you use a filesystem that supports resizing (like ReiserFS for example), you can increase your array without even taking it offline!
What kind of a story is this?
This is not news!
"Security doesn't just mean moving away from MS". All hail the king of DUHHHH!
I was at the Vancouver showing.
I've done a lot of smoke and mirror shows myself, and this demo did not smell funny at all.
The headline "Scientists Dubious of Quantum Claims" is rather sensationalist for what they're actually saying in the article.
Can you really fault them for not wanting to move a computer that has to be housed in a special chamber, cooled to near absolute zero, and be havily shielded from any outside interference?
Besides, judging by the questions people asked, not a single person in the audience could have verified that it was a computer and not a big refrigerator.
What I saw were a group of really smart people who are onto something real, and need to drum up enthusiasm for a later release of their product.
Their machine appeared to do what they claimed it did, and while it is quite easy to fake it, I didn't get such an impression at the demo.
I mean, really...
Isn't it kind of obvious when someone's personal life is interfering with their professional life?
Is it so hard to take the cue from the rest of the world, where such nonsense is not even considered (with no apparent ill effects)?
Don't be silly, government is not after you.
e d_canadian_on_no_fly_li.php
Tell that to Mahad Arar.
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/10/tortur
While you can bash the tools as much as you want, the point remains that the majority of the fault for bad programs lies with the programmer.
.S files created by your compiler? Do you even know what they are? Could you load an object file into a disassembler?
Just as an adept sculptor can build a beautiful (though somewhat rough) art piece using a chainsaw, so can a good programmer make do in situations where he is forced to use the wrong tool for the job.
Namespaces can be simulated with a good naming convention.
OO can be accomplished in a procedural language.
Technologies can be married together, and even replaced in part with other technologies at a later date (it's called refactoring, folks!)
I currently program exclusively in Java. I learned from the ground up (Analog electronics -> Digital logic -> Machine code & Assembly -> C -> C++ -> other OO languages & scripting languages, AOP etc)
I'd love to have multiple inheritance in Java, but I hate the fact that you can't rebind a reference in C++.
I'd love to have real properties and closures supported by the Java language proper, but I make do with standardized boilerplate code in the meantime.
I love the quick UI building you can do in VB, but I certainly wouldn't want to write business logic with it!
Access is great for building quick and simple systems, and does its job well, but I'm not going to store 10 million records in it!
Nothing beats the speed of a library written in assembler, but I'm certainly not going to write database access code in it!
Perl is a great tool in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it is the worst disaster ever, and the first thing I get rid of when I take over support of a project (except for 10% of the time when the previous programmer was competent).
I've seen horrendous code in every language I've ever encountered, and it's always a result of the programmer not understanding what he's working with. My personal opinion is that you shouldn't be programming unless you understand at least one layer below where you're working.
Do you know how to examine a core dump? How about interpreting a Java HotSpot dump?
Do you understand how the technology you're working with interacts with the operating system?
Do you know how the auto-code generator deep within the script overlay you're using actually works? Have you even once looked at the intermediate output?
How about the
What will you do when something goes wrong with it? Give up?
Do you follow the generally accepted practices used in your domain? Do you even know what they are?
Do you know what domain driven design is?
Do you understand when it's a bad idea to use inheritance? (Answer: most of the time)
I could go on forever. The point is that good programmers find the right tool for the job because they understand how it all works. Hackers do it fast, but forget to make it readable or maintainable. Bad programmers just plain do a bad job and make things shitty for everyone.
If this guy had even bothered to look online at what AJAX is today, he'd realize that there are frameworks such as Echo2 http://www.nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/ that make writing AJAX applications no more complicated than writing Swing apps.
AJAX is happening because there's nobody willing to take the lead in Web 2.0.
1. Download Echo2 http://nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/
2. Write AJAX applications like you would a Swing app, never touching HTML or Javascript.
3. Go outside and play.
'nuff said.
The thing to remember about automated code inspectors is: be smart about it.
// Iterate over all files /* nothing to do here */) // Get the next file // If the file has a modification date later than now // Throw an exception stating that the file is modified in the future
Don't trust the code inspector to enforce a policy (except maybe coding style).
There's a lot of boilerplate code that goes into a program, and a code duplication monitor will cause all sorts of headaches in this area.
The same problem exists with comment checkers. If code is written properly, there is usually very little need to comment inside most methods. The name and javadoc will give more than enough description of what the method will do (you DO use javadoc, don't you?)
It's only as the method's complexity increases to a point where it's not blatantly obvious what's going on inside that you need comments at that level.
I've had too many managers force me to comment like this:
for(Iterator iter = files.iterator(); iter.hasNext();
{
File file = (File)iter.next();
if(file.lastModified() > new Date().getTime())
{
throw new ModifiedInFutureException(file.toString() " + has a modification date in the future");
}
}
Ok it looks much uglier after running through Slashdot's dumb filter, but you get the idea.
The above code in reality needs no comments whatsoever, except perhaps a single line at the top saying "Disallow modification dates in the future", but a bad policy caused ALL code checked in to comply with silly regulations, resulting in countless hours lost.
In truth, the date check code itself should have been implemented as a policy class to be added to the verify method, but I digress.
My DoCoMo phone has had barcode scanning available to it for YEARS.
A few years ago, they added the ability to scan those 2D "barcodes", and they're everywhere in Japan. You scan the code, and it forwards your phone to a promotional website.
Get with the times!
I can see it now, cops beating down your door because some software giant is getting some heat over a bug in a library you wrote over 20 years ago.
Sendmail authors, beware!
Your PC gets zombified, and suddenly you are hit with a tax bill for 3 billion emails.
Load a simple word document, get a NullPointerException.
Nice program you got there.