There's nothing wrong with Ekiga as such, but there are many people I want to communicate with that use Skype and none that use Ekiga. It's a "network effects" thing; the greatest benefit to me comes through using closed software for VoIP. YMMV.
One positive aspect of this is the reduction of energy loss due to the superconductivity. This may also allow long distance lines to be run (even though the cooling will be a problem) which might help balance out the grid when needed.
Cooling is indeed a problem, but it's a problem for normal underground power cables too. Yes, normal cables don't need to be so cold, but they also generate a lot more heat that needs to be got rid of. What's interesting is that overall switching to superconducting cables is still a win (they wouldn't be rolling it into production if they didn't think that) even after considering increased capital costs, and that they can push those sorts of voltages and currents through high-temperature superconductors. Neat stuff!
I don't think this is competitive with above ground cables yet; they're enormously cheaper IIRC both to build and maintain (but can't be used everywhere). As such, most of the world's power infrastructure won't change for a while.
isn't that a browser problem? The browser should not put UTF-8 into a text field which is latin1.
It's really a spec problem. Or perhaps it'd be better to call that a "lack of spec" problem; it was never clearly defined what should happen, so people ended up hacking together tricks that mostly worked, but which sometimes failed totally. Luckily, most sites have switched to UTF-8 and the problem's gone away. Except not yet slashdot...
Re:I miss local statics. But apart from that it's
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
My only issue is the lack of local static variables. [...] I've heard that the reason for this omission is because of threading and it's impact. Blaaa, if you're doing threading you should know better.
Decades of evidence points to programmers not knowing better. No matter how much they should, they don't. You have to hit them with a pretty big stick to stop them from doing the lazy broken thing, and taking away local statics is just one more example of this. (Personally, I'd be tempted to much further and take away most state that's not thread-local, but that's not how C#, or Java or C++, works.)
Emacs has editing modes for many languages and file formats. By standardizing on that, you don't paint yourself into a corner, unlike a single language IDE. (Also, those who prefer vi can still use Emacs in viper mode, so Emacs is a more flexible choice than vi for the company).
GCC is a compiler collection, with support for many languages. By standardizing on that, you don't paint yourself into a corner with a single language.
That really depends on what language you are using. If you're using Java, gcc sucks and Emacs is remarkably less efficient than you'd hope. Eclipse really is better for Java, and that's speaking as someone who's a certified instinctive Emacs user. Eclipse is better because it manages packages better, and that makes an enormous difference by getting the #1 source of bloat out of your face. Ant (with the Sun compiler as a back end) is better than make+gcj because it handles complex sets of class libraries more easily and the code it produces works better (fewer crashes, given a general source base).
But if your project is in C+Python, I bet Emacs and make/gcc will do great.
My recommendation is to chose two: one "scriptish" language (PHP, Python, etc.) and one strong-typed language (Java, Eiffel). C# is sort of a compromise between the two, [...]
While I agree with your general recommendation (except to note that you may need more than two; some dialect of SQL is frequently the third) I should point out that C# is actually in the same general linguistic category as Java, i.e. great for writing components, but less good at sticking them together.
They could fully embrace open source. But that means risking the dominance of Office--their other cash cow. And they're not going to do that.
Actually, one of the big things that they could do is focus on expanding Office, rolling out a consistent WP, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, etc. platform to everyone. If they did that, I'd be willing to bet that they'd get people buying it for Linux. Maybe their OS would fail if they did that, but it sounds like that's going to be more of a cost center than a net income generator in the future anyway based on the amount of time it took to create Vista.
So what's the excuse again? That we simply suck when it comes to doing things the right way?
I don't know what your excuse is, but the reason is due to crappy regulation that's resulted in monopolies that aren't serving the public interest. When the infrastructure provider is necessarily the same as the service provider, you have a problem (since the infrastructure is inherently a monopoly; nobody's fond of lots of streets being dug up to put in new capacity). There used to be exactly the same problem in the UK; the regulator here was very close to BT (who had the market sewn up just as thoroughly as Ma Bell ever did in the US). But the government/regulator (I forget which) decided to force BT to allow competition for the service part, and that's prompted both reduced prices and greatly improved levels of service. The former monopoly is still a big player, sure, but they're a competitive big player now, and I believe that having a free market in ISP services is what you need too.
If not, ask for yourselves (and your politicians) why the FCC hates capitalism and the free market, and goes instead for crypto-communist corporatism. Yeah, I know that's logically inconsistent, of course, but language like that is usually a good way to slant the argument the way you want.
Ad-blocking support should conceal from the remote site that the ad is being blocked.
Any site that gets sniffy because I choose to block their advertisers from slowing down my browsing experience, is a site that I don't need to read. I'll take my browser (and my money) elsewhere. I suggest you might want to do the same. Today. Now.
How am I supposed to pay for a roof over my head!?
Make it so furiously complicated to configure in a useful way that nobody ever actually wants to use the code without paying you for support and/or hosting.
How can you tell if someone is using a secure SSL connection for work related purposes (Email, large file transfers, terminal services) and someone that is using SSL for bit torrent?
You can hazard a guess using traffic analysis. Bit torrent (and other P2P apps) use a different pattern of connections to normal browsing because the torrent clients also act as servers for many simultaneous external clients, and it's very difficult to conceal that, even if the content of the connections is hidden by encryption. (Of course, such analysis cannot detect the legal status of the data being transferred. Not unless the EVIL bit is set in the packet headers...)
you're better off actually understanding your code instead of having the computer explain... That's just the point. Your code isn't the problem for you to understand. In the real world where people have to look at other people's code, you often need all the debugging help you can get. I've worked with other people's code for a long time now, and yet the most useful thing from a debugger is indeed usually just a stack trace. Typically when a stack trace is insufficient, the other debugger facilities won't help that much either; you're still left staring at the code thinking "WTF!"
Stroustrup is being very smug in his response here. He lives in an ivory tower, how much real-world code written by other people (to a deadline or management constraints) has he ever dealt with? My feeling is, very little.. If you want to improve your productivity (and haven't already done this) write a suite of unit tests so that you can check you haven't made any blunders as part of your normal build process. If you can divide your code into distinct modules and check that each works correctly on its own, it's much easier to then focus on just the inter-module issues rather than having to deal with the code as one large mass. (The problem with debuggers is that they're not very good at respecting the module boundaries that you know about; they just pile everything together in a jumble.) Of course, getting test suites right is itself rather tricky. That's why you have coverage tools. And don't forget to use tools like valgrind or purify.
Indeed you can. The distribution would be the important part. For larger organizations this is not a problem as they can push the additional root certificate as part of their standard software installation.
Verifying that the party you're communicating with for the first time is the same party who owns a given domain is a separate task, and SSL conflates the two tasks. This is a good thing, especially for non-technical users. There's no way that you can educate people to the point that they'll all understand security, and it's all too easy to lose existing contexts (disk crashes, "helpful" cleanup programs, etc.) You also want to be able to renegotiate the level of security (e.g. if the previous crypto algorithms used got broken).
However it's an order of magnitude at least more difficult to perform a man in the middle attack than to simply observe the data from the network. (I was going to moderate this thread, but there's sufficient misinformation that I'll reply instead.) There are two sorts of attacks possible, either by snooping or by DNS poisoning (well, there are more, but those are the main two). Snooping is defeated by encrypting the channel. DNS poisoning (and other types of man-in-the-middle attacks) is defeated by ensuring that the person/server at the end is who you think it is. The best way to do that is if you already know the public key of the other party, but that's completely impractical for anything other than very small networks. Certificate Authorities are a workaround for this (as are PGP/GPG-style webs of trust) and all they should do at a basic level is guarantee that the certificate for foobar.com is only issued to the owner of foobar.com. Higher levels of assurance are possible (e.g. by binding the name of the owner or owning organization in the certificate) but they're optional. Without that basic identity guarantee, it'd be trivial for phishers or other low-lifes to insert themselves between you and the other party, and you'd have a nice properly encrypted conversation with a bunch of masquerading scum.
South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida: Do I really need to elaborate on these? No, but you got up such a wonderful head of steam with that previous rant that it seems like a shame to stop there.
Please, slashdotters weigh in, because I've missed something here. You've got most of the key things (I'd go for more of the intermediate resistors and capacitors too, but that' personal taste). Add a multimeter to that selection, and you've got a reasonable mix. Better would be an oscilloscope, but that's a much bigger outlay. Also, it's probably a good idea to get some cheap switches (both toggle and push-to-make) and a few variable resistors. And if you're going to experiment with building a radio, definitely get a variable capacitor and a diode. (If not, don't bother.)
I have more than enough power to do irrevocable damage to the company Get over yourself, you only have the power to obey The Man. "irrevocable damage" will end your sysadmin career & probably land you in jail. There are other things than destructively deleting data. A few off the top of my head...
"Accidentally" making the network go offline for a few days immediately before everyone's salary is due to be paid
Forging a message from the big boss to everyone giving everyone's pay and bonuses (including faking the logs so that it seems that he really did send it)
Sending sensitive data (e.g. pricing or product plans) to competitors
Installing viruses on everyones' computers as part of a centrally mandated update
I'm sure you can think of other unethical things that would leave fewer fingers pointing back at you. You wouldn't do them (I hope!) but it ultimately comes back to the fact that sysadmins are in a privileged position; they're the people who have to be trusted because ultimately they're the people who are the digital mechanics, the archivists, the custodians, the child-minders, and the trash men. The only ways to avoid having to have someone fairly low-level highly privileged are for all admins to be be high-level (a sort-of definitional way out) or for all users to really know what they're doing so no baby-sitting is needed. For some reason, neither seems to happen that much...
Of course, at one of my old jobs at an ISP, another admin (who was a nibshit) found a stash of kiddie porn in a users folder. I suppose it's a positive story, since the guy ended up going to jail. Was it the user or the other admin who went to jail? Or (best of all) both?
Slashdot Mirror
Skype is a problem - what's wrong with Ekiga?
There's nothing wrong with Ekiga as such, but there are many people I want to communicate with that use Skype and none that use Ekiga. It's a "network effects" thing; the greatest benefit to me comes through using closed software for VoIP. YMMV.
One positive aspect of this is the reduction of energy loss due to the superconductivity. This may also allow long distance lines to be run (even though the cooling will be a problem) which might help balance out the grid when needed.
Cooling is indeed a problem, but it's a problem for normal underground power cables too. Yes, normal cables don't need to be so cold, but they also generate a lot more heat that needs to be got rid of. What's interesting is that overall switching to superconducting cables is still a win (they wouldn't be rolling it into production if they didn't think that) even after considering increased capital costs, and that they can push those sorts of voltages and currents through high-temperature superconductors. Neat stuff!
I don't think this is competitive with above ground cables yet; they're enormously cheaper IIRC both to build and maintain (but can't be used everywhere). As such, most of the world's power infrastructure won't change for a while.
Yes, but it would use the unholy letters of the dark lord himself, and bring death and destruction upon any man who gazed upon its ghastly source.
Ah! I see you know APL...
isn't that a browser problem? The browser should not put UTF-8 into a text field which is latin1.
It's really a spec problem. Or perhaps it'd be better to call that a "lack of spec" problem; it was never clearly defined what should happen, so people ended up hacking together tricks that mostly worked, but which sometimes failed totally. Luckily, most sites have switched to UTF-8 and the problem's gone away. Except not yet slashdot...
My only issue is the lack of local static variables. [...] I've heard that the reason for this omission is because of threading and it's impact. Blaaa, if you're doing threading you should know better.
Decades of evidence points to programmers not knowing better. No matter how much they should, they don't. You have to hit them with a pretty big stick to stop them from doing the lazy broken thing, and taking away local statics is just one more example of this. (Personally, I'd be tempted to much further and take away most state that's not thread-local, but that's not how C#, or Java or C++, works.)
Emacs has editing modes for many languages and file formats. By standardizing on that, you don't paint yourself into a corner, unlike a single language IDE. (Also, those who prefer vi can still use Emacs in viper mode, so Emacs is a more flexible choice than vi for the company).
GCC is a compiler collection, with support for many languages. By standardizing on that, you don't paint yourself into a corner with a single language.
That really depends on what language you are using. If you're using Java, gcc sucks and Emacs is remarkably less efficient than you'd hope. Eclipse really is better for Java, and that's speaking as someone who's a certified instinctive Emacs user. Eclipse is better because it manages packages better, and that makes an enormous difference by getting the #1 source of bloat out of your face. Ant (with the Sun compiler as a back end) is better than make+gcj because it handles complex sets of class libraries more easily and the code it produces works better (fewer crashes, given a general source base).
But if your project is in C+Python, I bet Emacs and make/gcc will do great.
My recommendation is to chose two: one "scriptish" language (PHP, Python, etc.) and one strong-typed language (Java, Eiffel). C# is sort of a compromise between the two, [...]
While I agree with your general recommendation (except to note that you may need more than two; some dialect of SQL is frequently the third) I should point out that C# is actually in the same general linguistic category as Java, i.e. great for writing components, but less good at sticking them together.
With the assistance of my arms and hands, I find my mind can control all sorts of physical objects very easily.
They could fully embrace open source. But that means risking the dominance of Office--their other cash cow. And they're not going to do that.
Actually, one of the big things that they could do is focus on expanding Office, rolling out a consistent WP, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, etc. platform to everyone. If they did that, I'd be willing to bet that they'd get people buying it for Linux. Maybe their OS would fail if they did that, but it sounds like that's going to be more of a cost center than a net income generator in the future anyway based on the amount of time it took to create Vista.
So what's the excuse again? That we simply suck when it comes to doing things the right way?
I don't know what your excuse is, but the reason is due to crappy regulation that's resulted in monopolies that aren't serving the public interest. When the infrastructure provider is necessarily the same as the service provider, you have a problem (since the infrastructure is inherently a monopoly; nobody's fond of lots of streets being dug up to put in new capacity). There used to be exactly the same problem in the UK; the regulator here was very close to BT (who had the market sewn up just as thoroughly as Ma Bell ever did in the US). But the government/regulator (I forget which) decided to force BT to allow competition for the service part, and that's prompted both reduced prices and greatly improved levels of service. The former monopoly is still a big player, sure, but they're a competitive big player now, and I believe that having a free market in ISP services is what you need too.
If not, ask for yourselves (and your politicians) why the FCC hates capitalism and the free market, and goes instead for crypto-communist corporatism. Yeah, I know that's logically inconsistent, of course, but language like that is usually a good way to slant the argument the way you want.
Pink text on green background.
Brown text on hot-pink background is good too. Provided you hate your eyes.
To the person who modded the parent Informative, I salute you on behalf of Slashdot!
Win + R opens the "run" box
The only thing missing is a built-in shortcut to open a command prompt.
Well that, and a functional command prompt.
Don't worry; you can get bash for Windows too.
Ad-blocking support should conceal from the remote site that the ad is being blocked.
Any site that gets sniffy because I choose to block their advertisers from slowing down my browsing experience, is a site that I don't need to read. I'll take my browser (and my money) elsewhere. I suggest you might want to do the same. Today. Now.
You are thinking small. Ask how many dump trucks full of money.
Oh, I don't know about that. One of these can hold a hell of a lot of hundred dollar bills...
How am I supposed to pay for a roof over my head!?
Make it so furiously complicated to configure in a useful way that nobody ever actually wants to use the code without paying you for support and/or hosting.
How can you tell if someone is using a secure SSL connection for work related purposes (Email, large file transfers, terminal services) and someone that is using SSL for bit torrent?
You can hazard a guess using traffic analysis. Bit torrent (and other P2P apps) use a different pattern of connections to normal browsing because the torrent clients also act as servers for many simultaneous external clients, and it's very difficult to conceal that, even if the content of the connections is hidden by encryption. (Of course, such analysis cannot detect the legal status of the data being transferred. Not unless the EVIL bit is set in the packet headers...)
- "Accidentally" making the network go offline for a few days immediately before everyone's salary is due to be paid
- Forging a message from the big boss to everyone giving everyone's pay and bonuses (including faking the logs so that it seems that he really did send it)
- Sending sensitive data (e.g. pricing or product plans) to competitors
- Installing viruses on everyones' computers as part of a centrally mandated update
I'm sure you can think of other unethical things that would leave fewer fingers pointing back at you. You wouldn't do them (I hope!) but it ultimately comes back to the fact that sysadmins are in a privileged position; they're the people who have to be trusted because ultimately they're the people who are the digital mechanics, the archivists, the custodians, the child-minders, and the trash men. The only ways to avoid having to have someone fairly low-level highly privileged are for all admins to be be high-level (a sort-of definitional way out) or for all users to really know what they're doing so no baby-sitting is needed. For some reason, neither seems to happen that much...