Such databases are plentiful already (google reverse hash lookup), and believe it or not: The knowledge that the password "hunter2" has been used as on one of Yahoo's two million accounts, is neither news to a cracker nor particularly useful.
Yahoo runs nothing but Linux [netcraft.com]. They would have had to intentionally bypass Linux security basics and roll their own to end up in such a mess.
Uh, no. I don't think it's common practice to give each person who signs up an actual system account at the server, so Yahoo do not get the benefit of the shadow password scheme in Linux (to the degree that it's a benefit at all, there's a reason we use SSH authentication these days).
Better, but still not very good. At best, a cracker needs to corellate your passwords from two leaks, to see which part is the variable part. Or perhaps he can figure it out looking at just a single instance, if the variable bit is obvious enough.
It's better to use a password manager, and two factor authentication where it is offered, such as gmail.
For that matter, I store many passwords in gmail. If someone has gained control of that account, they can use password resets to gain access to those sites anyway, so there's no additional risk in storing them there.
Saying Hansen isn't a climatologist is a bit like saying Claude Shannon wasn't a computer scientist. Yeah, the term didn't exist back then, so his PhD was in astrophysics (about the atmosphere of Venus).
Yes, logically, a person's lack of education doesn't imply something he's written is poor. But we don't have an infinite amount of time and attention. It's nothing new at all that time and attention is rationed according to educational achievements - arguably, it's one of the main things we use those formal educational titles for.
But anyway, Watts' pre-release paper does get attention, and people do adress why he's wrong.
Because at some point, being aware that you're not writing good code comes in the way of being productive. He thinks he has problems with motivation, ha! I kind of mean it when I say I'm best at writing tests.
* I was good at correcting other people's programming homework. * Back when I played around with topcoder I scored more points from finding subtle bugs in others' code (that the automatic tests missed) than my own solutions. * I am good at helping colleagues figure out strange bugs. * I am good at seeing potential problems.
But conversely, I have never completed a personal programming project on the scale of what GoodNewsJimDotCom (2244874) linked, either in time or code lines. My code sucks, or at least it seems that way to me, which dampens motivation. I get bogged down in rewrites (on my own projects), which kills most of them.
Actually, I'm convinced the world, and the business world in particular, needs negative people. Kinda like in Hindu mythology, you know? Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys. I guess I'm a "Shiva" sort of person. But it's a hard sell in job interviews.
He was dismissing the paper because one author appears to not be formally trained as a meteorologist.
No, I was just correcting Rei slightly. I also wanted to make the point that genuine meteorologists have a pretty serious education, and TV presenters don't (these days). Many TV presenters outstep their field of expertise and pretend they know more than the do - just like us engineers;) Watts is also pretty cranky, but that's beside the point. If you have time to take seriously the publications of someone with his poor record (as well as lack of a record), all the more power to you.
And this will be done rather quickly I expect, by people who are much more competent to judge it than me. It's not quite a simple time series analysis - you also need some domain specific information which I haven't, related to physics and even history (e.g. the introduction of electronic thermometers).
Also: some bloggers do go back to school, and get respected in their field of interest. Just not Watts.
he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California
A weatherman. In some countries, weather presenters are called meteorologists, but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist. Watts' highest completed education is high school, as far as anyone has been able to make out.
Eventually Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and every other rat-bastard corporation is going to form a patent pool and use it to lock out competitors in the mobile space.
Eventually, maybe, when they get any competitors which would require such a monster portfolio to stop.
Right now, the junior partner, patent disadvantaged due to its young age, is Google. It is the indirect target of all these lawsuits, the monster they want to stop. It's just too popular (not least in Washington) to sue directly without a proxy.
I will tell you though, I would LOVE to give you a job interview, because I you would surely do something entertaining that I would tell stories about long after.
You bastard! I envy this kid. It's much easier to take an optimistic person and make them pessimistic (about how well they will understand their code in two years, about how well others can work with your code) than vice versa. We natural pessimists are only good for writing tests;)
Rather than practicing coding every day, you should practice coding with other people. You may be productive in your own way, but you simply won't learn to write code others can extend/maintain/work with the way you're doing now. It's like learning Russian from a textbook alone. You may think you understand the importance of clean, readable, DRY code, like you may think you understand Russian pronounciation, but you won't really until you need it.
Try to get into a small, agile-ish team, including a dedicated tester! The skills needed to see problems just aren't as compatible with the ones needed to see solutions as we might wish. Whatever you do, don't let yourself be confined to a "silo", responsible for your own code and nothing else. Then you'll become rich as an Intuit developer, and lose all pride in your work by 35.
I don't really care how much the user interface sucks but why not put the data into a SQL database?!?
Because the program was started in 1992, and it's now 11 million lines of code. Think it's well documented? Think it got unit tests? Think it's got a nice, clean interface through which all database calls are made? Then you're not working in with SMB software:)
I've seen secondhand the amount of work it takes on a comparable application (Mamut, started in 1995, switched to SQL by version 11 some years ago). I understand why Intuit wants to avoid this, especially when making profit in the billions.
The reason Apple does it publicly, is that they have to defend their image as spectacularly innovative. They couldn't just have handed over the patents to a proxy and sued with that - although it would have been a lot less risky. They need to defend the idea that rounded corners are innovative, not just in court but in public opinion as well (at least, the part of the public that buys their products).
Microsoft does not want to disclose which patents they're using to get royalties for Android/Linux. Apart from the VFAT patent, it is not publicly known which 235 patents Microsoft claim to own that cover the Linux kernel - they only reveal that to parties they approach to intimidate, a really bizarre and perverse state of affairs if you ask me.
Prince Esterhazy (Mozart and Haydn's patron) wasn't appreciably less able to buy baroque furnishing than Prince Leopold (Bach's patron). So no, it really was just fashion at that point.
There's a big change in the leap from analog to digital synthesizers as well. Early digital synth sounds will probably be forever associated with ABBA.
Minimalism has a deeply hipster heritage. Sometime late in the 16th century some clever guy observed, "Hey, look! In the past they made complex, ponderous music in line with the ponderous, complex architecture and interior decoration that was in style that day. Today, we prefer simpler, smoother lines in our rococco chairs, and what do you know, we prefer simpler, more elegant music as well! Maybe music reflects the society we live in?"
Then for a hundred years or so, composers veered a bit between making music that unconsciously reflected the times and societies they lived in - because it sounded nice to them - and making music that deliberately was supposed to reflect society. At the times, nationalism was big, and the popular music of the time was embraced (and somewhat set in stone, as the notion of what "real" Czech, Norwegian or Romanian music should sound like).
Then eventually, some people thought they could get a shortcut to fame by not only consciously aiming at the music that reflects society, but aiming at the music that would be popular in the future. (This was probably fueled by the historicist doctrines of e.g. Marxism, which asserted that scientific prediction of the path of history/evolution of society was possible). Mostly they made horrible music which, when the future came around, didn't really get all that popular. It scraped by, at least economically, by appealing to an increasingly fashion-conscious upper class.
Now popular music had moved along - the bit of it that had been set in stone as "folk music" by romantic theorists was still around, but much of it had kept moving too, and thus we got modern popular music. Modern popular music was disliked by music theorists, because it didn't fit into their theories, and thus it was derided as simple and primitive (never mind that the folk music they idolized 30 years ago was simple in exactly the same ways).
But other theorists kept wanting to predict the next big thing. They figured that if pop music reflected society, then it would soon have a parallel in the visual arts. If they could kickstart that style based on this intuition, they would be famous. Thus, Pop Art was born. Since it was the product of a highly intellectual academic tradition, it was in many ways as far from pop music as you could get, and it didn't really get very noticed.
But it stuck around for a while, and then something bizarre happened: some other theorists discovered it, and were unaware of its origins as a conscious effort derived from pop music. They thought, hey, this visual art style is up and coming, it reflects the society that's on its way - but it doesn't have a parallel in music. We can get famous if we get there first! And thus Minimalism was born.
The Pop Art theorists had a pretty condescending view of popular music, so they made their installations/works simple and primitive. The Minimalists faithfully made this into a simplistic and somewhat primitive form of music. Popular music two steps removed.
The amazing thing is that somewhere along the path, they stopped taking themselves so damn seriously, and actually made some music that's interesting in its own right. Which is pretty much unique among the over-theorised "classical" music of the 20th century.
Bah, such lawsuits are far too sporadic, and although random awards have been given, they have an abysmal success rate (most are thrown out). They influence creativity very little, fortunately.
shifts between major and minor, tempo shifts and synth embellishments makes it sound a lot more complex than it really is.
Aren't these things real complexity to you? Why not? Not any mode shift, tempo shift or synth embellishment is equally good. Discovering post rock I've gained an appreciation for just how much you can do with just dynamics.
I don't quite trust this research for that reason. Transcribing the chords of a tune isn't an exact science. It's not rare to find both simple chord arrangements and complex ones, and I've seen myself that people are biased to seeing more complexity in the stuff they like than what they don't like.
Apropos weird tunes and Woody Guthrie: "Whoope-ti yi yo get along little dogies" is a fascinating and strange song, despite usually being played with only two chords. That kind of stretched, whomping three beats rhythm sounds eerily similar to some west/central asian stuff which it (probably) isn't related to at all.
But, as anyone who has looked into a folk music collection project knows, most folk music is a lot more bland and forgettable than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I believe it. Our sysadmin wanted to go with Windows phones, and my boss with Java ME.
Such databases are plentiful already (google reverse hash lookup), and believe it or not: The knowledge that the password "hunter2" has been used as on one of Yahoo's two million accounts, is neither news to a cracker nor particularly useful.
Uh, no. I don't think it's common practice to give each person who signs up an actual system account at the server, so Yahoo do not get the benefit of the shadow password scheme in Linux (to the degree that it's a benefit at all, there's a reason we use SSH authentication these days).
Better, but still not very good. At best, a cracker needs to corellate your passwords from two leaks, to see which part is the variable part. Or perhaps he can figure it out looking at just a single instance, if the variable bit is obvious enough.
It's better to use a password manager, and two factor authentication where it is offered, such as gmail.
For that matter, I store many passwords in gmail. If someone has gained control of that account, they can use password resets to gain access to those sites anyway, so there's no additional risk in storing them there.
Saying Hansen isn't a climatologist is a bit like saying Claude Shannon wasn't a computer scientist. Yeah, the term didn't exist back then, so his PhD was in astrophysics (about the atmosphere of Venus).
Yes, logically, a person's lack of education doesn't imply something he's written is poor. But we don't have an infinite amount of time and attention. It's nothing new at all that time and attention is rationed according to educational achievements - arguably, it's one of the main things we use those formal educational titles for.
But anyway, Watts' pre-release paper does get attention, and people do adress why he's wrong.
Because at some point, being aware that you're not writing good code comes in the way of being productive. He thinks he has problems with motivation, ha! I kind of mean it when I say I'm best at writing tests.
* I was good at correcting other people's programming homework.
* Back when I played around with topcoder I scored more points from finding subtle bugs in others' code (that the automatic tests missed) than my own solutions.
* I am good at helping colleagues figure out strange bugs.
* I am good at seeing potential problems.
But conversely, I have never completed a personal programming project on the scale of what GoodNewsJimDotCom (2244874) linked, either in time or code lines. My code sucks, or at least it seems that way to me, which dampens motivation. I get bogged down in rewrites (on my own projects), which kills most of them.
Actually, I'm convinced the world, and the business world in particular, needs negative people. Kinda like in Hindu mythology, you know? Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys. I guess I'm a "Shiva" sort of person. But it's a hard sell in job interviews.
No, I was just correcting Rei slightly. I also wanted to make the point that genuine meteorologists have a pretty serious education, and TV presenters don't (these days). Many TV presenters outstep their field of expertise and pretend they know more than the do - just like us engineers ;) Watts is also pretty cranky, but that's beside the point. If you have time to take seriously the publications of someone with his poor record (as well as lack of a record), all the more power to you.
And this will be done rather quickly I expect, by people who are much more competent to judge it than me. It's not quite a simple time series analysis - you also need some domain specific information which I haven't, related to physics and even history (e.g. the introduction of electronic thermometers).
Also: some bloggers do go back to school, and get respected in their field of interest. Just not Watts.
You're welcome, Watts.
he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California
A weatherman. In some countries, weather presenters are called meteorologists, but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist. Watts' highest completed education is high school, as far as anyone has been able to make out.
Eventually, maybe, when they get any competitors which would require such a monster portfolio to stop.
Right now, the junior partner, patent disadvantaged due to its young age, is Google. It is the indirect target of all these lawsuits, the monster they want to stop. It's just too popular (not least in Washington) to sue directly without a proxy.
You bastard! I envy this kid. It's much easier to take an optimistic person and make them pessimistic (about how well they will understand their code in two years, about how well others can work with your code) than vice versa. We natural pessimists are only good for writing tests ;)
Rather than practicing coding every day, you should practice coding with other people. You may be productive in your own way, but you simply won't learn to write code others can extend/maintain/work with the way you're doing now. It's like learning Russian from a textbook alone. You may think you understand the importance of clean, readable, DRY code, like you may think you understand Russian pronounciation, but you won't really until you need it.
Try to get into a small, agile-ish team, including a dedicated tester! The skills needed to see problems just aren't as compatible with the ones needed to see solutions as we might wish. Whatever you do, don't let yourself be confined to a "silo", responsible for your own code and nothing else. Then you'll become rich as an Intuit developer, and lose all pride in your work by 35.
For some (low) value of "debugged and tested", and generous use of the cut and paste functionality of modern editors, this is quite possible.
Because the program was started in 1992, and it's now 11 million lines of code. Think it's well documented? Think it got unit tests? Think it's got a nice, clean interface through which all database calls are made? Then you're not working in with SMB software :)
I've seen secondhand the amount of work it takes on a comparable application (Mamut, started in 1995, switched to SQL by version 11 some years ago). I understand why Intuit wants to avoid this, especially when making profit in the billions.
The reason Apple does it publicly, is that they have to defend their image as spectacularly innovative. They couldn't just have handed over the patents to a proxy and sued with that - although it would have been a lot less risky. They need to defend the idea that rounded corners are innovative, not just in court but in public opinion as well (at least, the part of the public that buys their products).
Microsoft does not want to disclose which patents they're using to get royalties for Android/Linux. Apart from the VFAT patent, it is not publicly known which 235 patents Microsoft claim to own that cover the Linux kernel - they only reveal that to parties they approach to intimidate, a really bizarre and perverse state of affairs if you ask me.
Prince Esterhazy (Mozart and Haydn's patron) wasn't appreciably less able to buy baroque furnishing than Prince Leopold (Bach's patron). So no, it really was just fashion at that point.
There's a big change in the leap from analog to digital synthesizers as well. Early digital synth sounds will probably be forever associated with ABBA.
Minimalism? Or maybe just variation?
Minimalism has a deeply hipster heritage. Sometime late in the 16th century some clever guy observed, "Hey, look! In the past they made complex, ponderous music in line with the ponderous, complex architecture and interior decoration that was in style that day. Today, we prefer simpler, smoother lines in our rococco chairs, and what do you know, we prefer simpler, more elegant music as well! Maybe music reflects the society we live in?"
Then for a hundred years or so, composers veered a bit between making music that unconsciously reflected the times and societies they lived in - because it sounded nice to them - and making music that deliberately was supposed to reflect society. At the times, nationalism was big, and the popular music of the time was embraced (and somewhat set in stone, as the notion of what "real" Czech, Norwegian or Romanian music should sound like).
Then eventually, some people thought they could get a shortcut to fame by not only consciously aiming at the music that reflects society, but aiming at the music that would be popular in the future. (This was probably fueled by the historicist doctrines of e.g. Marxism, which asserted that scientific prediction of the path of history/evolution of society was possible). Mostly they made horrible music which, when the future came around, didn't really get all that popular. It scraped by, at least economically, by appealing to an increasingly fashion-conscious upper class.
Now popular music had moved along - the bit of it that had been set in stone as "folk music" by romantic theorists was still around, but much of it had kept moving too, and thus we got modern popular music. Modern popular music was disliked by music theorists, because it didn't fit into their theories, and thus it was derided as simple and primitive (never mind that the folk music they idolized 30 years ago was simple in exactly the same ways).
But other theorists kept wanting to predict the next big thing. They figured that if pop music reflected society, then it would soon have a parallel in the visual arts. If they could kickstart that style based on this intuition, they would be famous. Thus, Pop Art was born. Since it was the product of a highly intellectual academic tradition, it was in many ways as far from pop music as you could get, and it didn't really get very noticed.
But it stuck around for a while, and then something bizarre happened: some other theorists discovered it, and were unaware of its origins as a conscious effort derived from pop music. They thought, hey, this visual art style is up and coming, it reflects the society that's on its way - but it doesn't have a parallel in music. We can get famous if we get there first! And thus Minimalism was born.
The Pop Art theorists had a pretty condescending view of popular music, so they made their installations/works simple and primitive. The Minimalists faithfully made this into a simplistic and somewhat primitive form of music. Popular music two steps removed.
The amazing thing is that somewhere along the path, they stopped taking themselves so damn seriously, and actually made some music that's interesting in its own right. Which is pretty much unique among the over-theorised "classical" music of the 20th century.
According to some possible measures, yes.
Bah, such lawsuits are far too sporadic, and although random awards have been given, they have an abysmal success rate (most are thrown out). They influence creativity very little, fortunately.
Aren't these things real complexity to you? Why not? Not any mode shift, tempo shift or synth embellishment is equally good. Discovering post rock I've gained an appreciation for just how much you can do with just dynamics.
I don't quite trust this research for that reason. Transcribing the chords of a tune isn't an exact science. It's not rare to find both simple chord arrangements and complex ones, and I've seen myself that people are biased to seeing more complexity in the stuff they like than what they don't like.
Apropos weird tunes and Woody Guthrie: "Whoope-ti yi yo get along little dogies" is a fascinating and strange song, despite usually being played with only two chords. That kind of stretched, whomping three beats rhythm sounds eerily similar to some west/central asian stuff which it (probably) isn't related to at all.
But, as anyone who has looked into a folk music collection project knows, most folk music is a lot more bland and forgettable than that.