CVS has hooks that allow you to run external programs at various points. You can eliminate this problem by putting a call to dos2unix (or something similiar) at the appropriate place.
I've even been known to threaten calling a source code reformatter there, if certain individuals in the office continued to ignore the coding standards.
There are times when I may not want to give someone the right to redistribute my code, or modify it, or even to view it in its entirety. I may not like this myself, but in the real world it sometimes happens. (E.g., maybe my application requires a commercially produced third-party CD for its operation. Think of a game, or a data-intensive application. I don't have the right to redistribute that disc, nor can I confer it to others.)
Right now I can weigh the overall benefits and decide that partial disclosure is better than none. E.g., maybe I can publish a p-code interpreter even if I can't publish the p-code or its source.
But under an absolutist approach, I can't publish anything. The p-code is no real loss, since I couldn't distribute it anyway, but now nobody gets to see the interpreter either.
Is a RMS-free lincense free?
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Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If I face a choice between keeping my software private (avoiding the whole issue of freedom vs. power since nobody will ever see the code), or releasing it under the RMS-free license:
This software may be used by any person other than RMS, and for any reason. RMS may not view this code; hell, he can't even be told it exists. The only restriction on derived works is that it must retain all RMS-free provisions.
Would this be a free license? Besides the obvious point that the license would become completely free at some point in the future, there's the practical matter that it will not affect RMS's ability to use my code in any way - the alternative to the RMS-free license is that I don't let anyone see the code (or not without explicit compensation in terms of salary or licensing fees). The only people affected are the 6,127,317,984 people who are neither RMS nor I.
What's the alternative? Is anyone seriously suggesting that I must publish all code I write? If so, why are programmers different from, oh, lawyers? (They must represent anyone who demands their services, without compensation.) Or doctors and dentists? Or taxi drivers. Or anyone else in the service sector?
/opt is for external packages that are not part of your "core" system. Any third-party package (not from your distro) should definitely go here, although some distros make them damn near impossible to create with their standard tools. (Cluestick: maybe offical packages should never put stuff in/opt, but by the same measure unofficial packages should never put stuff into/usr/bin! Yet some distros have tools that make this nearly impossible.) Some vendors also put their official, but optional, packages in this directory.
/usr/local is for internal packages that are not distributed outside of your organization, for data files that don't fit anywhere else, etc. (Cluestick: see above. I'm also in the camp that says everything under/usr/local should also be under package management.)
The line isn't always clear cut, but a good touchstone is the package management. If it's already packaged, put it in/opt. If you have to package it yourself, put it in/usr/local. Another approach is to ask where you turn for updates. If it's another company, website, etc., put it in/opt. If it's Sue down the hall, put it in/usr/local. In both cases, if you distribute your package outside of your organization you (and they) should put the package under/opt.
The current ratings have Manos in the large block tied for second... but it has almost 3000 votes - 10 times more than the "winner," and over three times more votes than any of its peers.
It even has close to a thousand more votes than _Police Academy: Mission to Moscow_, the movie with the second most votes.
That has to count for something. Any bad movie can get negative votes, but it takes a really bad movie to get 50% more negative votes than a _Police Academy_ movie!
Relational databases didn't come to dominate the database market because they pushed aside equally valid alternatives, they dominate the market because relational databases implement relational calculus. Indeed, that's the very touchstone that distinguishes relational databases from something like DBM and its many descendants.
And *that* is important because it assures the desiger and user that every possible operation is well-defined and (hopefully) correctly implemented. The exact syntax for a "join" may differ, and a specific implementation may be flawed, but everyone agrees to a common baseline.
For hierarchial databases to really take off, they need to have an equally strong mathematical underpinning. For now, AFAIK, there is none other than that you get when you map a hierarchial database into relational tables and use exactly those relational properties. That's a good start, but if you're only using the properties in relational databases, why not stick with them?
As for XML, that's completely irrelevant. It's a good format for transferring data, but that's about it. You can store hierarchial data in an XML file, but you can also use it to store purely relational data or completely unstructured data (in some CDATA block).
What's the modulus size used for the key pair? 1024 bits? 512? 256?!
What's the algorithm used? RSA? DSA? something else?
What's the key length of the symmetrical cipher used to actually encrypt the data? 128 bits? 64? 56? 40? (Remember that a *lot* of Windows software defaulted to 40 bit encryption due to ITAR restrictions.)
What's the algorithm used to actually generate these "random" symmetrical keys? Can it be easily predicted?
What's the symmetrical cipher used? What mode does it use? (Specifically, is it "Electronic Code Book (ECB)" or "Cipher Block Chaining (CBC)"? The former is *much* easier to crack than the latter. Does it use a constant IV, or block-based IVs? Again, the former is *much* easier to crack than the latter.
The Microsoft web page offers one answer. Triple DES is supported, if you are running Windows XP Professional, but all earlier platforms and even WXP by default use "DESX, a variation of the DES standard." In other words, absolute crap - the *only* way to know that a cipher is solid is to expose it to prolonged cryptanalysis by knowledgable people. DES is considered weak now (due to brute force attacks), 3DES is usually considered acceptable but I wouldn't use "DESX" to encrypt my grocery list since it's a total unknown. The mere fact that they choose this oddball variant, instead of any of the newer, IP-free ciphers, screams WARNING - there are unacknowledged motivations here!.
I didn't see any mention of ECB vs. CBC, changing IV vectors, etc., all basic information that you would expect to see for the buzzword factor alone. Since they never wipe the plaintext files, it sounds like someone got a copy of Krypto4Kiddies and never got past the first few chapters.
(IANAL, but am someone who tries to keep current on civil liberty issues... so take everything with a grain of salt...)
One spouse cannot be forced to testify against the other because, under the law, they are often considered a single individual. This is why it too so long for spousal rape and domestic violence laws to be passed - it wasn't (just) a bunch of good old boys who didn't see a problem, but a delicate balancing act between a centuries old tradition and modern concerns - the legislatures wanted to avoid accidently wiping out all marital privilege. It's also why homosexual spouses want legally recognized marriages - marriage includes a lot of rights which no civil contract, alone, can provide.
IIRC, lawyer-client privilege follows a similar argument. Everyone is expected and required to understand the law, but that requires the ability to freely consult experts (lawyers) for advice. So the law squints and say that lawyers are in essence an extension of the person *when discussion prior acts*, or to a limited extend future acts. Same thing with cleric-penitent privilege and doctor-patient privilege.
However, lawyers have never been able to give unfettered advice regarding future actions by the client. E.g., your lawyer can't be compelled to reveal that you admitted killing a business rival (N.B., "killing" is an act, "manslaughter," "murder" et al are legal evaluations), but it's a very different thing if you ask your lawyer how you can kill a business rival in the future and face no more than a manslaughter conviction.
It sounds like the DoJ is just seeking to formally recognize that some detainees may be seeking to use their lawyers as agents of future violence, not just sources of legal advice, and wish to prevent that. Risky, but not unreasonable.
Hello, former Attorney General Ed "by definition, all suspects are guilty" Meese!
We are not talking about people convicted of a crime. We are talking about people who have been DETAINED pending trial... possibly even without formal charges filed yet. These are people who can't make bail, who are considered flight risks, etc., but not convicted of any crime.
And while there are some practical reasons to support this change (esp. if the DoJ establishes a "wall" between the people who listen to these conversations for insight into future acts of terrorism and those who prosecute the individuals for any crimes previously committed), it has one huge constitutional drawback - it establishes two standards of treatment for defendants. If you're detained, the DoJ can eavesdrop on your conversations with your lawyer. If you can post bail, they can't. (Think they'll be able to bug lawyer's offices? ha ha ha ha!)
It's gruesome right now - if you're in the wrong city you should be prepared for a *long* search because it's REVENGE OF THE INCOMPETENT HR MANAGER time. Don't have 10 years of Java experience? Then don't bother sending your resume... or pointing out that the language is less than 10 years old so anyone who claims this much experience is lying. Don't have 5+ years experience in both COBOL and the lastest EJB/J2EE technologies, then don't bother responding because the company insists on merging two (or more!) positions while cutting the salary by a third.
That said, networking is usually best but it's worthless when everyone you know is unemployed in a mass corporate panic. You probably aren't looking for the same jobs, of course, but the usual information net is severely pruned since there's no water cooler gossip, etc.
Second best is online sites, but you have to be very careful about sleazy body shops that will float your resume to everyone on the planet. They will *not* help you, and in fact will harm you since many companies will refuse to hire anyone with resumes from multiple sources to avoid any threat of confusion over "finder's fees" and the like.
What I've found practical are only replying to 1) recruiters and companies I've worked with in the past, 2) or recruiters who give local addresses and meaningful contact information, and 3) ads that have provide some details. I never put my resume up on a web site (and not just because it's a phone book after almost 20 years), and I never send it to someone who uses a generic drop box email address.
I've passed on some great ads... but I really can't take a one-line ad from a recruiter a thousand miles away from the job seriously. Yes, this can legitimately happen, but in those cases the recruiter has always willing to explain the circumstances in response to quick note. It's the ones who quietly ignore me and my hard-learned concerns that make me worry.
1) Bolt two single-edge razor blades together, use them the draw parallel slits on smoked glass. It would probably not be wise to give middle-school students access to the blades...:-)
2) Bolt two single-edge razors blade-to-blade. One side can be fixed, the other adjusted by a screw. Instant variable size single slits, and you should be able to make this middle-school student safe.
3) Take out your trusty laser printer and print two vertical lines on a sheet of bright white paper. Photograph it with true B&W film (not that new "color process" junk), cut the film with your handly single-edge razor and install it in a 35mm slide holder.
4) Use the same technique to produce other fun patterns. E.g., besides single and double slits, gratings, etc., there's the starburst pattern where you alternate white and black wedges. Each wedge is 1/2 to 5 degrees wide. You *will* see weird printer artifacts, but you can minimize this by explicitly setting both black and white pixels. (Easy with postscript, I don't know about other tools.)
The article did not jump to conclusion that this impact occured around 2300 BCE, it merely mentioned it as an intriguing possibility. Nothing but intriguing speculation until scientists can study samples from the impact site.
The only people claiming that the impact *was* in 2300 BCE are Slashdot readers.
As for the other argument that this is a cop-out, Occam's Razor cuts both ways. Localized disruptions only require localized events, but widespread social collapse is easier to explain by one major catastrophe (literall, "ill star!") than dozens or hundreds of smaller independent events.
So what if it's just a benchmark of Office XP? That one application suite (including a full version of Outlook) is easily the most widely used application - almost everyone uses it at least some of the time, many people use it almost exclusively.
This means a benchmark of this application *alone* is still extremely useful, precisely because it will affect everyone. Performance elsewhere might be much better, but you would need to see *major* improvement in a lot of places to offset an 11% tax on the most common app.
As for the argument that the performance hit is offset by increased reliability... that's a hard call to make. This will certainly help people who have problems with the system locking up, but what about people who already have acceptable reliability via rebooting their system nightly?
Not only do I agree 100%, I would put it even more strongly.
Stop thinking like a freshman who expects to find the answers in the back of the book. Even if you find this information someplace, the nature of commodity (vs. scientific) gear is that the manufacturer can change it at any time to meet market needs.
You're a senior and need to start thinking like one. If you need calibration data, and you do, you should be thinking about how to get it for yourself using other commodity equipment. This is important today, critical with the improved hardware a decade or two from now.
A trivial example I would have killed for 20 years ago? A 600 DPI laser printer. With it you can easily produce high quality optical test patterns, including some basic grey scales. (A standard sized sheet of paper will have far more 'pixels' than the CCD element in the camera.)
A slightly more advanced example is what you can do with a cheap A/D card. 10-bits of accuracy doesn't sound like much, but if you're clever you can leverage it.
Finally, I would strongly recommend that you review the "Amateur Scientist" columns in Scientific American over the past four or five years. If you can construct a simple closed feedback loop (cheap op-amp chip) and monitor it with an A/D converter ($100), you can do some incredible experiments.
Yeah, right, all XML and SGML parsers have to read the entire document before anything can be done. All of those SAX parsers are a figment of my fevered imagination. *rolleyes*
Now, if you're pointing out that XML provides no mechanism for indexing so you'll have to scan the file *until* you reach the record you're interested in, I agree. But as others have pointed out, nobody uses XML as the storage format for anything but the smallest databases. (E.g., configuration files.) But the translation to/from XML format for queries no more breaks its 'purity' than converting SQL "insert" clauses into binary data stored in B-tree or ISAM tables breaks its relational purity.
Don't forget about the other type of CA - corporate (or educational) internal CAs. These CAs don't issue certs to the general public, they issue them to employees, students, whatever, so the individual can access corporate or school resources.
This solves a *lot* of problems, since you can assume all authorized users have a valid cert. If someone is fired, leaves school, whatever, you can revoke their cert immediately. Some resources might not check the CRL, but others definitely will.
But this, of course, requires installing your own cert. Oh, to be sure, you can outsource this operation to a commercial CA and be covered by their root cert. At a modest cost of something like $20-$100 per employee per year. (It's been a while since I checked the prices.) A lot of organizations won't mind that cost, but others will. It's not like this system is hard to maintain, once installed.
You have that backwards - smaller black holes have a steeper gravity gradient near the event horizon and they emit "hotter" radiation.
But I thought that the real way an advanced civilization would use black holes to produce energy involved putting a matter stream into the "ergosphere," to transfer some of its rotational energy to the matter stream.
There are businesses that will buy old corporate computers en masse (Computer Renaissance at the national level, Cummings & Associates in Denver, undoubtably many others), and they'll guarantee that the disks are wiped, etc. No information will be leaked, the computers will be kept out of the trash stream, and the public has access to decent computers at a low cost. That's where I picked up 5 166 MHz Compaqs a few years ago for about $200 each - great for learning things where an "oops" can cause you to lose the contents of your disk, even lose the computer (if I ever get around to hooking one up for "Amateur Scientist" type experiments.)
Unfortunately, every company I deal with has told me that Microsoft is essentially trying to shut down the used computer market. They claim that the used corporate computers which are the backbone of this business (since consumers generally hold onto their computers too long) are almost always covered by site licenses that prohibit resale. Unless the company can provide an original Windows disc and certificate for each and every system, the reseller has to purchase a new copy. Not OEM copy, a retail version. And of course we're talking about a retail version of the latest OS, not the OS suitable for the hardware.
So a $250 used computer is suddenly $500 and a dog because of the bloated OS. A new computer, which can actually run the bloatware, is only a few hundred dollars more... plus you get a subscription to MSN for the next few years! No conflict of interest here, nope, none at all! And of course the people who really need cheap computers don't realize that the real price is much higher but MS has essentially given them a high interest loan with repayment through their MSN fees.
You would think that charities and schools would have exceptions, with Microsoft writing off the cost of the unsold licenses as a charitable deduction, but you would be wrong. Microsoft has been cracking down on school systems - damn it, Bill needs a new BMW more than those inner city kids need a good education!
*We* can take a bare system and install Linux or *BSD on it, but most people can't. And the software Gestapo, since it hasn't actually been hauled in the court to challenge their increasingly outrageous statements, has actually convinced some PHBs that they'll somehow be held responsible if their old systems are reused by someone else without a proper license ("since they should have known of the inevitable infraction") that they'll figure it's better to trash the systems than risk an enforcement action.
So the bottom line is that before you ask your employer to donate old computers, you need to do some research and figure out how you will get licenses for these computers. If you can show that you'll take responsibility for keeping the Gestapo away, for wiping the disks of any OS and company data, etc., then you might be able to make a deal where you pick up the computers instead of a disposal company. (See other comment about why the computers shouldn't just be dumped in the trash.) But without that, don't expect to get very far.
Call the EPA - computers contain a lot of heavy metals (monitors have many pounds of lead in the optical glass, motherboards also have heavy metals in solder, gold wires within chips, etc.) and should be propery disposed of. There's far less heavy metals than in the first few generations of PCs, but still enough that they should be not be put into the regular trash stream. There are businesses that will handle this for a modest cost, about $50/system is typical.
Once you point this out - and the fact that superfund sites have established the precedence that the government can, and will, go after pollution sources years after the fact, you can point out that anyone who takes a donated computer both saves them a recycling fee and gives them a charitable write-off. I doubt this alone will have much of an effect (see other posts), but it's worth a shot.
And keeping heavy metals out of the ecosystem is a good idea in any case.
They may be required to identify themselves (both company and individual) upon demand, pursuit to the "DNC order" since you must be able to document who you told not to call you again (d'uh), but about half the time I demand this information they "accidently" disconnect me before providing this information..
By some amazing coincidence this almost always happens with blocked caller ID information. I could probably call Qworst and ask them to trace it, but I know that it's a dead end.
I only happened once, years ago, with valid caller ID information. For a long distance carrier. I couldn't reach the same department, but I reached another department and had a chat with the supervisor about the consequences of hanging up on people exercising their legal rights to stop solicitations - something that was especially pointless in this case since they were trying to sell me business services for "distinctive ringing" on my home phone number, not a separate business line! She couldn't give me the name and numbers I requested, but did promise to forward my demand (not request, demand) that a senior manager contact me on the following Monday about their violation of federal law. They never called me back, of course, but they never called me back *at all* so I let it slide.
The other scam some have tried is to claim that it could take "up to 90 days" for the DNC order to be processed. I tell them I didn't care, if they call me again they can tell it to the judge. They try to insist that the federal law permits this, I repeat that I don't care - if they call me again they'll be explaining it to the judge.
I'm sure that the law *does* allow a "reasonable" time for the DNC order to be processed, but that should be a few weeks at most with a manual system that depends on paper forms physically mailed to a central site, then physically mailed to each site in an update list. With a computerized system, the DNC order should go live either immediately or some time during the middle of the night.
Were you aware that early records included licenses that restricted the purchaser from reselling them, or even playing them on unauthorized players?
Those restrictions went into the dustbin of history.
Even earlier, books used to have the same restrictions. You could not sell them, loan them to others, etc. Benjamin Franklin, that radical, really shook up a lot of people when he created public libraries that lent books to anyone who asked.
Again, those early restrictions went into the dustbin of history.
Off the top of my mind, I think *every* new media has started out with this "you don't own the material, you only lease it, and you can't transfer or sell your right to access it" crap. Or worse, the time-restricted variant like that unlamented "Div-X" DVD format.
Software is no exception. It's only because of our collective short memory that Microsoft is currently getting away with this... and the RIAA and MPAA are trying to revive the same crap that our great-grandparents defeated.
NOBODY is claiming that the $200 you pay for a retail copy of Windows gives you the right to duplicate it and sell it to others. But that is ALL copyright is intended to stop - prior to copyright laws it was common for publishers to reprint and sell books published by others, without any compensation to the owner or original publisher. And even that "abuse" wasn't totally unreasonable prior to the development of good distribution channels. (This was done even before canals were first built, when transportation was always extremely expensive because it involved mule trains on muddy roads that where often unpassable.)
I'm not sure that assumption (that they don't care if you sold your preinstalled NT license after buying a full version of WXP) is valid. I've heard too many horror stories with companies ending up with *three* Windows licenses for their new systems - the bundled OS, the "site license" OS which turns out to only cover existing systems, and a retail version of the same OS.
It's pretty clear that MS considers bundled OS licenses to be mandatory and non-transferable. If you want all of your systems to be running the same version of the OS (which you certainly do, to reduce maintenance costs) that's an independent problem and you'll just have to live with handing over hard cash for a new set of licenses.
I looked into what would be required to implement this a while back. It's actually pretty straightforward, although the naive implementation will tend to grind the disk. (Using two spindles is a *very* good idea!)
To implement it, you need to create three subpartitions. The naive implementation has three distinct areas, better implementations would interleave them somehow.
The first subpartition contains the live filesystem, and it could be *any* filesystem. It really doesn't matter - like the loopback FS, this approach creates a new virtual device that only cares about individual blocks.
The second subpartition contains a circular buffer with the *previous* contents of each block as it is written.
The third subpartition contains an index, one entry for each block in the second partition. Again, it would be a circular buffer on the disk. (Indeed, for performance it should be interleaved with the cache, e.g., one index block followed by the 256 cache blocks it represents, repeating.) The index contains the block number and the time it was updated. Alternately, you could store just the last block number and maintain a separate list containing time stamps and "last index written."
Write access is straightfoward - immediately before you write any block you copy the existing block into the circular buffer, update the index, then write the new block. This is not much different from regular journaling systems.
Read access is a bit more complex. If you are "live," you always read the live FS. If you have rolled back the FS, you check the index for the first update after the time in question. If it exists, you return the cached block. Otherwise you return the block from the live FS. But in practice you will undoubtably explicitly mount each rolled back version of the FS. With a fixed time, you can create a bitmap of changed blocks and quickly load the appropriate block. The driver would have to update this bitmap if the 'live' FS is also mounted. With a "delayed realtime" mount (e.g., showing changes as they occured 12 hours ago) you would update the bitmap from the index prior to each read.
I have always opposed active defenses (deliberately trying to crash any system trying to crack mine) in the past.
But if any organization thinks (or worse, *gets*) the legal right to tell me that I have no recourse if they destroy my data - which includes not only my personal files but files used by my business and files I'm working on for my clients - then I have no option but to be much more aggressive about defending my system. I have no "illegal" MP3s (the ones I have are ripped from my own disks, for use in featherweight MP3 players during exercise), but that provides no immunity from either their attempts to crack my system or damage if they do get in.
E.g., to use that recent Code Red II virus as an example, instead of merely logging IP addresses I would use that script that responds to every attacking site with its own attack designed to shut down the remote site. Hopefully cleanly, but no guarantees. It's this very lack of guarantees of a clean shutdown with no adverse secondary consequences which is why I, and others, have opposed active measures in the past. But if I think there's even a remote credible risk that my clients who depend on my security will be harmed, I'll be far more proactive.
Of course, backups will prevent loss of most data. But the time required to identify the extent of damage, restore files, make up lost work between backup cycles, etc., is time I'm not working for clients. I'm not getting paid, my clients aren't getting their work done, etc. The damages from a single incident would quickly exceed thousands of dollars - far more than I spend on *all* entertainment (CDs, videos, cable TV, movies) in a year. That's real damages that can be proven in court - reduction in hours billed to clients (lost income), increase in hours billed to internal support (increased costs), possibly lost clients. None of this "oh, pity our record profits in the face of 'piracy' crap."
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CVS has hooks that allow you to run external programs at various points. You can eliminate this problem by putting a call to dos2unix (or something similiar) at the appropriate place.
I've even been known to threaten calling a source code reformatter there, if certain individuals in the office continued to ignore the coding standards.
There are times when I may not want to give someone the right to redistribute my code, or modify it, or even to view it in its entirety. I may not like this myself, but in the real world it sometimes happens. (E.g., maybe my application requires a commercially produced third-party CD for its operation. Think of a game, or a data-intensive application. I don't have the right to redistribute that disc, nor can I confer it to others.)
Right now I can weigh the overall benefits and decide that partial disclosure is better than none. E.g., maybe I can publish a p-code interpreter even if I can't publish the p-code or its source.
But under an absolutist approach, I can't publish anything. The p-code is no real loss, since I couldn't distribute it anyway, but now nobody gets to see the interpreter either.
Would this be a free license? Besides the obvious point that the license would become completely free at some point in the future, there's the practical matter that it will not affect RMS's ability to use my code in any way - the alternative to the RMS-free license is that I don't let anyone see the code (or not without explicit compensation in terms of salary or licensing fees). The only people affected are the 6,127,317,984 people who are neither RMS nor I.
What's the alternative? Is anyone seriously suggesting that I must publish all code I write? If so, why are programmers different from, oh, lawyers? (They must represent anyone who demands their services, without compensation.) Or doctors and dentists? Or taxi drivers. Or anyone else in the service sector?
/opt is for external packages that are not part of your "core" system. Any third-party package (not from your distro) should definitely go here, although some distros make them damn near impossible to create with their standard tools. (Cluestick: maybe offical packages should never put stuff in /opt, but by the same measure unofficial packages should never put stuff into /usr/bin! Yet some distros have tools that make this nearly impossible.) Some vendors also put their official, but optional, packages in this directory.
/usr/local should also be under package management.)
/opt. If you have to package it yourself, put it in /usr/local. Another approach is to ask where you turn for updates. If it's another company, website, etc., put it in /opt. If it's Sue down the hall, put it in /usr/local. In both cases, if you distribute your package outside of your organization you (and they) should put the package under /opt.
/usr/local is for internal packages that are not distributed outside of your organization, for data files that don't fit anywhere else, etc. (Cluestick: see above. I'm also in the camp that says everything under
The line isn't always clear cut, but a good touchstone is the package management. If it's already packaged, put it in
One other oddity - 9.8% of the votes rank it 10 (excellent), 81.4% rank it 1 (awful). The "winner" has 13.1% ranking it 10, 64.4% rank it 1 (awful).
That means 186 people gave the "winner" a 1, vs. 2391 for Manos.
What more proof do you need? 97.3% of statistics lie!
The current ratings have Manos in the large block tied for second... but it has almost 3000 votes - 10 times more than the "winner," and over three times more votes than any of its peers.
It even has close to a thousand more votes than _Police Academy: Mission to Moscow_, the movie with the second most votes.
That has to count for something. Any bad movie can get negative votes, but it takes a really bad movie to get 50% more negative votes than a _Police Academy_ movie!
Relational databases didn't come to dominate the database market because they pushed aside equally valid alternatives, they dominate the market because relational databases implement relational calculus. Indeed, that's the very touchstone that distinguishes relational databases from something like DBM and its many descendants.
And *that* is important because it assures the desiger and user that every possible operation is well-defined and (hopefully) correctly implemented. The exact syntax for a "join" may differ, and a specific implementation may be flawed, but everyone agrees to a common baseline.
For hierarchial databases to really take off, they need to have an equally strong mathematical underpinning. For now, AFAIK, there is none other than that you get when you map a hierarchial database into relational tables and use exactly those relational properties. That's a good start, but if you're only using the properties in relational databases, why not stick with them?
As for XML, that's completely irrelevant. It's a good format for transferring data, but that's about it. You can store hierarchial data in an XML file, but you can also use it to store purely relational data or completely unstructured data (in some CDATA block).
The Microsoft web page offers one answer. Triple DES is supported, if you are running Windows XP Professional, but all earlier platforms and even WXP by default use "DESX, a variation of the DES standard." In other words, absolute crap - the *only* way to know that a cipher is solid is to expose it to prolonged cryptanalysis by knowledgable people. DES is considered weak now (due to brute force attacks), 3DES is usually considered acceptable but I wouldn't use "DESX" to encrypt my grocery list since it's a total unknown. The mere fact that they choose this oddball variant, instead of any of the newer, IP-free ciphers, screams WARNING - there are unacknowledged motivations here!.
I didn't see any mention of ECB vs. CBC, changing IV vectors, etc., all basic information that you would expect to see for the buzzword factor alone. Since they never wipe the plaintext files, it sounds like someone got a copy of Krypto4Kiddies and never got past the first few chapters.
(IANAL, but am someone who tries to keep current on civil liberty issues... so take everything with a grain of salt...)
One spouse cannot be forced to testify against the other because, under the law, they are often considered a single individual. This is why it too so long for spousal rape and domestic violence laws to be passed - it wasn't (just) a bunch of good old boys who didn't see a problem, but a delicate balancing act between a centuries old tradition and modern concerns - the legislatures wanted to avoid accidently wiping out all marital privilege. It's also why homosexual spouses want legally recognized marriages - marriage includes a lot of rights which no civil contract, alone, can provide.
IIRC, lawyer-client privilege follows a similar argument. Everyone is expected and required to understand the law, but that requires the ability to freely consult experts (lawyers) for advice. So the law squints and say that lawyers are in essence an extension of the person *when discussion prior acts*, or to a limited extend future acts. Same thing with cleric-penitent privilege and doctor-patient privilege.
However, lawyers have never been able to give unfettered advice regarding future actions by the client. E.g., your lawyer can't be compelled to reveal that you admitted killing a business rival (N.B., "killing" is an act, "manslaughter," "murder" et al are legal evaluations), but it's a very different thing if you ask your lawyer how you can kill a business rival in the future and face no more than a manslaughter conviction.
It sounds like the DoJ is just seeking to formally recognize that some detainees may be seeking to use their lawyers as agents of future violence, not just sources of legal advice, and wish to prevent that. Risky, but not unreasonable.
Hello, former Attorney General Ed "by definition, all suspects are guilty" Meese!
We are not talking about people convicted of a crime. We are talking about people who have been DETAINED pending trial... possibly even without formal charges filed yet. These are people who can't make bail, who are considered flight risks, etc., but not convicted of any crime.
And while there are some practical reasons to support this change (esp. if the DoJ establishes a "wall" between the people who listen to these conversations for insight into future acts of terrorism and those who prosecute the individuals for any crimes previously committed), it has one huge constitutional drawback - it establishes two standards of treatment for defendants. If you're detained, the DoJ can eavesdrop on your conversations with your lawyer. If you can post bail, they can't. (Think they'll be able to bug lawyer's offices? ha ha ha ha!)
It's gruesome right now - if you're in the wrong city you should be prepared for a *long* search because it's REVENGE OF THE INCOMPETENT HR MANAGER time. Don't have 10 years of Java experience? Then don't bother sending your resume... or pointing out that the language is less than 10 years old so anyone who claims this much experience is lying. Don't have 5+ years experience in both COBOL and the lastest EJB/J2EE technologies, then don't bother responding because the company insists on merging two (or more!) positions while cutting the salary by a third.
That said, networking is usually best but it's worthless when everyone you know is unemployed in a mass corporate panic. You probably aren't looking for the same jobs, of course, but the usual information net is severely pruned since there's no water cooler gossip, etc.
Second best is online sites, but you have to be very careful about sleazy body shops that will float your resume to everyone on the planet. They will *not* help you, and in fact will harm you since many companies will refuse to hire anyone with resumes from multiple sources to avoid any threat of confusion over "finder's fees" and the like.
What I've found practical are only replying to 1) recruiters and companies I've worked with in the past, 2) or recruiters who give local addresses and meaningful contact information, and 3) ads that have provide some details. I never put my resume up on a web site (and not just because it's a phone book after almost 20 years), and I never send it to someone who uses a generic drop box email address.
I've passed on some great ads... but I really can't take a one-line ad from a recruiter a thousand miles away from the job seriously. Yes, this can legitimately happen, but in those cases the recruiter has always willing to explain the circumstances in response to quick note. It's the ones who quietly ignore me and my hard-learned concerns that make me worry.
A couple ideas....
:-)
1) Bolt two single-edge razor blades together, use them the draw parallel slits on smoked glass. It would probably not be wise to give middle-school students access to the blades...
2) Bolt two single-edge razors blade-to-blade. One side can be fixed, the other adjusted by a screw. Instant variable size single slits, and you should be able to make this middle-school student safe.
3) Take out your trusty laser printer and print two vertical lines on a sheet of bright white paper. Photograph it with true B&W film (not that new "color process" junk), cut the film with your handly single-edge razor and install it in a 35mm slide holder.
4) Use the same technique to produce other fun patterns. E.g., besides single and double slits, gratings, etc., there's the starburst pattern where you alternate white and black wedges. Each wedge is 1/2 to 5 degrees wide. You *will* see weird printer artifacts, but you can minimize this by explicitly setting both black and white pixels. (Easy with postscript, I don't know about other tools.)
The article did not jump to conclusion that this impact occured around 2300 BCE, it merely mentioned it as an intriguing possibility. Nothing but intriguing speculation until scientists can study samples from the impact site.
The only people claiming that the impact *was* in 2300 BCE are Slashdot readers.
As for the other argument that this is a cop-out, Occam's Razor cuts both ways. Localized disruptions only require localized events, but widespread social collapse is easier to explain by one major catastrophe (literall, "ill star!") than dozens or hundreds of smaller independent events.
So what if it's just a benchmark of Office XP? That one application suite (including a full version of Outlook) is easily the most widely used application - almost everyone uses it at least some of the time, many people use it almost exclusively.
This means a benchmark of this application *alone* is still extremely useful, precisely because it will affect everyone. Performance elsewhere might be much better, but you would need to see *major* improvement in a lot of places to offset an 11% tax on the most common app.
As for the argument that the performance hit is offset by increased reliability... that's a hard call to make. This will certainly help people who have problems with the system locking up, but what about people who already have acceptable reliability via rebooting their system nightly?
Not only do I agree 100%, I would put it even more strongly.
Stop thinking like a freshman who expects to find the answers in the back of the book. Even if you find this information someplace, the nature of commodity (vs. scientific) gear is that the manufacturer can change it at any time to meet market needs.
You're a senior and need to start thinking like one. If you need calibration data, and you do, you should be thinking about how to get it for yourself using other commodity equipment. This is important today, critical with the improved hardware a decade or two from now.
A trivial example I would have killed for 20 years ago? A 600 DPI laser printer. With it you can easily produce high quality optical test patterns, including some basic grey scales. (A standard sized sheet of paper will have far more 'pixels' than the CCD element in the camera.)
A slightly more advanced example is what you can do with a cheap A/D card. 10-bits of accuracy doesn't sound like much, but if you're clever you can leverage it.
Finally, I would strongly recommend that you review the "Amateur Scientist" columns in Scientific American over the past four or five years. If you can construct a simple closed feedback loop (cheap op-amp chip) and monitor it with an A/D converter ($100), you can do some incredible experiments.
Yeah, right, all XML and SGML parsers have to read the entire document before anything can be done. All of those SAX parsers are a figment of my fevered imagination. *rolleyes*
Now, if you're pointing out that XML provides no mechanism for indexing so you'll have to scan the file *until* you reach the record you're interested in, I agree. But as others have pointed out, nobody uses XML as the storage format for anything but the smallest databases. (E.g., configuration files.) But the translation to/from XML format for queries no more breaks its 'purity' than converting SQL "insert" clauses into binary data stored in B-tree or ISAM tables breaks its relational purity.
Don't forget about the other type of CA - corporate (or educational) internal CAs. These CAs don't issue certs to the general public, they issue them to employees, students, whatever, so the individual can access corporate or school resources.
This solves a *lot* of problems, since you can assume all authorized users have a valid cert. If someone is fired, leaves school, whatever, you can revoke their cert immediately. Some resources might not check the CRL, but others definitely will.
But this, of course, requires installing your own cert. Oh, to be sure, you can outsource this operation to a commercial CA and be covered by their root cert. At a modest cost of something like $20-$100 per employee per year. (It's been a while since I checked the prices.) A lot of organizations won't mind that cost, but others will. It's not like this system is hard to maintain, once installed.
You have that backwards - smaller black holes have a steeper gravity gradient near the event horizon and they emit "hotter" radiation.
But I thought that the real way an advanced civilization would use black holes to produce energy involved putting a matter stream into the "ergosphere," to transfer some of its rotational energy to the matter stream.
There are businesses that will buy old corporate computers en masse (Computer Renaissance at the national level, Cummings & Associates in Denver, undoubtably many others), and they'll guarantee that the disks are wiped, etc. No information will be leaked, the computers will be kept out of the trash stream, and the public has access to decent computers at a low cost. That's where I picked up 5 166 MHz Compaqs a few years ago for about $200 each - great for learning things where an "oops" can cause you to lose the contents of your disk, even lose the computer (if I ever get around to hooking one up for "Amateur Scientist" type experiments.)
Unfortunately, every company I deal with has told me that Microsoft is essentially trying to shut down the used computer market. They claim that the used corporate computers which are the backbone of this business (since consumers generally hold onto their computers too long) are almost always covered by site licenses that prohibit resale. Unless the company can provide an original Windows disc and certificate for each and every system, the reseller has to purchase a new copy. Not OEM copy, a retail version. And of course we're talking about a retail version of the latest OS, not the OS suitable for the hardware.
So a $250 used computer is suddenly $500 and a dog because of the bloated OS. A new computer, which can actually run the bloatware, is only a few hundred dollars more... plus you get a subscription to MSN for the next few years! No conflict of interest here, nope, none at all! And of course the people who really need cheap computers don't realize that the real price is much higher but MS has essentially given them a high interest loan with repayment through their MSN fees.
You would think that charities and schools would have exceptions, with Microsoft writing off the cost of the unsold licenses as a charitable deduction, but you would be wrong. Microsoft has been cracking down on school systems - damn it, Bill needs a new BMW more than those inner city kids need a good education!
*We* can take a bare system and install Linux or *BSD on it, but most people can't. And the software Gestapo, since it hasn't actually been hauled in the court to challenge their increasingly outrageous statements, has actually convinced some PHBs that they'll somehow be held responsible if their old systems are reused by someone else without a proper license ("since they should have known of the inevitable infraction") that they'll figure it's better to trash the systems than risk an enforcement action.
So the bottom line is that before you ask your employer to donate old computers, you need to do some research and figure out how you will get licenses for these computers. If you can show that you'll take responsibility for keeping the Gestapo away, for wiping the disks of any OS and company data, etc., then you might be able to make a deal where you pick up the computers instead of a disposal company. (See other comment about why the computers shouldn't just be dumped in the trash.) But without that, don't expect to get very far.
Call the EPA - computers contain a lot of heavy metals (monitors have many pounds of lead in the optical glass, motherboards also have heavy metals in solder, gold wires within chips, etc.) and should be propery disposed of. There's far less heavy metals than in the first few generations of PCs, but still enough that they should be not be put into the regular trash stream. There are businesses that will handle this for a modest cost, about $50/system is typical.
Once you point this out - and the fact that superfund sites have established the precedence that the government can, and will, go after pollution sources years after the fact, you can point out that anyone who takes a donated computer both saves them a recycling fee and gives them a charitable write-off. I doubt this alone will have much of an effect (see other posts), but it's worth a shot.
And keeping heavy metals out of the ecosystem is a good idea in any case.
They may be required to identify themselves (both company and individual) upon demand, pursuit to the "DNC order" since you must be able to document who you told not to call you again (d'uh), but about half the time I demand this information they "accidently" disconnect me before providing this information..
By some amazing coincidence this almost always happens with blocked caller ID information. I could probably call Qworst and ask them to trace it, but I know that it's a dead end.
I only happened once, years ago, with valid caller ID information. For a long distance carrier. I couldn't reach the same department, but I reached another department and had a chat with the supervisor about the consequences of hanging up on people exercising their legal rights to stop solicitations - something that was especially pointless in this case since they were trying to sell me business services for "distinctive ringing" on my home phone number, not a separate business line! She couldn't give me the name and numbers I requested, but did promise to forward my demand (not request, demand) that a senior manager contact me on the following Monday about their violation of federal law. They never called me back, of course, but they never called me back *at all* so I let it slide.
The other scam some have tried is to claim that it could take "up to 90 days" for the DNC order to be processed. I tell them I didn't care, if they call me again they can tell it to the judge. They try to insist that the federal law permits this, I repeat that I don't care - if they call me again they'll be explaining it to the judge.
I'm sure that the law *does* allow a "reasonable" time for the DNC order to be processed, but that should be a few weeks at most with a manual system that depends on paper forms physically mailed to a central site, then physically mailed to each site in an update list. With a computerized system, the DNC order should go live either immediately or some time during the middle of the night.
Were you aware that early records included licenses that restricted the purchaser from reselling them, or even playing them on unauthorized players?
Those restrictions went into the dustbin of history.
Even earlier, books used to have the same restrictions. You could not sell them, loan them to others, etc. Benjamin Franklin, that radical, really shook up a lot of people when he created public libraries that lent books to anyone who asked.
Again, those early restrictions went into the dustbin of history.
Off the top of my mind, I think *every* new media has started out with this "you don't own the material, you only lease it, and you can't transfer or sell your right to access it" crap. Or worse, the time-restricted variant like that unlamented "Div-X" DVD format.
Software is no exception. It's only because of our collective short memory that Microsoft is currently getting away with this... and the RIAA and MPAA are trying to revive the same crap that our great-grandparents defeated.
NOBODY is claiming that the $200 you pay for a retail copy of Windows gives you the right to duplicate it and sell it to others. But that is ALL copyright is intended to stop - prior to copyright laws it was common for publishers to reprint and sell books published by others, without any compensation to the owner or original publisher. And even that "abuse" wasn't totally unreasonable prior to the development of good distribution channels. (This was done even before canals were first built, when transportation was always extremely expensive because it involved mule trains on muddy roads that where often unpassable.)
I'm not sure that assumption (that they don't care if you sold your preinstalled NT license after buying a full version of WXP) is valid. I've heard too many horror stories with companies ending up with *three* Windows licenses for their new systems - the bundled OS, the "site license" OS which turns out to only cover existing systems, and a retail version of the same OS.
It's pretty clear that MS considers bundled OS licenses to be mandatory and non-transferable. If you want all of your systems to be running the same version of the OS (which you certainly do, to reduce maintenance costs) that's an independent problem and you'll just have to live with handing over hard cash for a new set of licenses.
I looked into what would be required to implement this a while back. It's actually pretty straightforward, although the naive implementation will tend to grind the disk. (Using two spindles is a *very* good idea!)
To implement it, you need to create three subpartitions. The naive implementation has three distinct areas, better implementations would interleave them somehow.
The first subpartition contains the live filesystem, and it could be *any* filesystem. It really doesn't matter - like the loopback FS, this approach creates a new virtual device that only cares about individual blocks.
The second subpartition contains a circular buffer with the *previous* contents of each block as it is written.
The third subpartition contains an index, one entry for each block in the second partition. Again, it would be a circular buffer on the disk. (Indeed, for performance it should be interleaved with the cache, e.g., one index block followed by the 256 cache blocks it represents, repeating.) The index contains the block number and the time it was updated. Alternately, you could store just the last block number and maintain a separate list containing time stamps and "last index written."
Write access is straightfoward - immediately before you write any block you copy the existing block into the circular buffer, update the index, then write the new block. This is not much different from regular journaling systems.
Read access is a bit more complex. If you are "live," you always read the live FS. If you have rolled back the FS, you check the index for the first update after the time in question. If it exists, you return the cached block. Otherwise you return the block from the live FS. But in practice you will undoubtably explicitly mount each rolled back version of the FS. With a fixed time, you can create a bitmap of changed blocks and quickly load the appropriate block. The driver would have to update this bitmap if the 'live' FS is also mounted. With a "delayed realtime" mount (e.g., showing changes as they occured 12 hours ago) you would update the bitmap from the index prior to each read.
I have always opposed active defenses (deliberately trying to crash any system trying to crack mine) in the past.
But if any organization thinks (or worse, *gets*) the legal right to tell me that I have no recourse if they destroy my data - which includes not only my personal files but files used by my business and files I'm working on for my clients - then I have no option but to be much more aggressive about defending my system. I have no "illegal" MP3s (the ones I have are ripped from my own disks, for use in featherweight MP3 players during exercise), but that provides no immunity from either their attempts to crack my system or damage if they do get in.
E.g., to use that recent Code Red II virus as an example, instead of merely logging IP addresses I would use that script that responds to every attacking site with its own attack designed to shut down the remote site. Hopefully cleanly, but no guarantees. It's this very lack of guarantees of a clean shutdown with no adverse secondary consequences which is why I, and others, have opposed active measures in the past. But if I think there's even a remote credible risk that my clients who depend on my security will be harmed, I'll be far more proactive.
Of course, backups will prevent loss of most data. But the time required to identify the extent of damage, restore files, make up lost work between backup cycles, etc., is time I'm not working for clients. I'm not getting paid, my clients aren't getting their work done, etc. The damages from a single incident would quickly exceed thousands of dollars - far more than I spend on *all* entertainment (CDs, videos, cable TV, movies) in a year. That's real damages that can be proven in court - reduction in hours billed to clients (lost income), increase in hours billed to internal support (increased costs), possibly lost clients. None of this "oh, pity our record profits in the face of 'piracy' crap."