I used to have a 386 lying around as a glorified alarm clock. Since I'm an insomniac (i.e. I don't wake up well because I don't get enough sleep), I used to write alarm clock programs that would require me to do some mentally challenging (but not impossible) work.
I'm also a math major going for my B.Sc so my idea of mentally challenging can be a little bit much sometimes...
I didn't realize how bad it was until I woke up to ``what's the last digit of 7 to the 103 power?''. Easy question to do if you know modular arithmetic and you want to think about it, but first thing in the morning...?
Anyways, the case of the 386 was open (and the alarm was going full bore) so I started throwing stuff at the computer in the hopes that I'd jar something. Eventually there was a loud crackle and my room started to smell like ozone.
Close inspection revealed a penny magnetized between a pair of pins on the motherboard. Turning the power off on the case made the penny fall out of the pins.
Imagine my surprise when the computer actually powered up afterwards... from that point on I would throw pennies from across the room whenever I wanted to get some extra sleep...
Ignore the specific topics for the time being: let's teach students better problem solving skills or better communication skills.
Problem solving skills lets you work better independently and makes you an asset to a team.
Communication skills ensures that you're not wasting team time when you have to ask for help.
Or how about teaching students how to learn (outside of a class)? New technologies emerge all the time. You are going to have to continue to develop your knowledge once you leave the school. School seems to focus on teaching the current technologies, what about future stuff?
Not knowing what purpose the DOM serves isn't going to make you bomb your job interview, but not communicating well certainly will! School should teach employable skills.
This regex works but I don't think it works for the reasons that the author intended. For example,
The [H|Cr] is a character class matching the single character H, C, r or |.
So this regex will match Hacker Insurance, and Cracker Insurance (bolding indicates what part of the word matches)... it will also match |acker Insurance
I wouldn't normally be so anal but the title involves hackers/crackers... you'd think you'd get the logic right, no?
I would humbly suggest the regex (H|Cr)acker Insurance
If the author was intending some weird regex syntax where [] indicates something other than a character class then I apologize in advance,
5) Trolls who will be constantly broadcasting that, "In Russia, you are the wearable computer...Searching for girls named Natilie and grits...First Shirt Post...Hey is this a first of a beowulf of cloths!"
Slightly off-topic (but I can't help saying it anyways):
In Communist Russia, you don't wear computer, computer wears you!
I used to use random strings in my programs as error messages... I didn't know that you could dump line numbers / file names by using __LINE__ and __FILE__. Anyways, I always picked unusual ones so that I could grep through my source files to pick out the error message.
I realized the error in my ways when I was approached by a confused co-worker who wanted to know what a ``fuzzy apple has red balls'' error message meant;)
1. It tends to rely on blocklists, many of which have demonstrated unfair practices in the past.
Weight the scores for each of the blocklist tests to 0. (SpamAssassin works out of the box for most people, obviously not for you; this is why we allow for local configs)
2. The more SpamAssassin is used, the more spammers will specifically avoid doing things SpamAssassin checks for.
Agreed. You can't really get around that. The spammers can use the same tools as us and customize their marketing to defeat our tools; so we write more tools, they defeat them, etc. We just need to be effective most of the time to make spam protection worthwhile... oh and minimize those false positives too;)
3. It's a gigantic heap of perl, the Write-Only (tm) language. I hate the fact that every perl program demands I mess up the package manager on my system by blindly downloading a half-dozen new modules. And it's slow!
k, don't give me the ``perl is a slow language'' argument because I flat out don't buy it. Your package manager not being able to deal with perl modules is the fault of your package manager; hrm... I need Time::HiRes, so I apt-get install libtime-hires-perl. Seems to work for me.
4. Bogofilter [sourceforge.net] is better. duh.
And the only reason that I'm not arguing with you here is that (a) I haven't used Bogofilter and (b) it was written by ESR who freaking rocks my world:)
If SpamAssassin doesn't do it for you then don't use it. It seems to do a good job for most of us though.
Unfortunately given human nature, we can't rely on sys admins and end users to patch their boxen. Almost every mechanism I can think of to automate this process either calls for automatically updating machines (which sucks if a patch breaks an untested scenario and also may need some legal exemptions) or some similar mechanisms to enable computers to help themselves
Uhm... apt-get dist-upgrade anyone?
And yes, you can put that in a cron job so that the machine will auto-upgrade...
And if your OS doesn't offer you something that simple...;)
I can't help but wonder that if regular concentrated sunlight can produce good results then can regular concentrated incandescent or fluorescent lights also produce good results. It seems to me that this is a spread-spectrum vs. coherent light proof-of-concept since there's nothing particularly special about sunlight itself (other than being free and bright)
Uhm... maybe the fact that the Sun has got a heck of a lot more wattage than any man-made light is significant?
I know it makes a heck of a lot of difference to those outdoor... tomatoes... that we grow here in British Columbia. There's really no comparing man-made light to sunlight...
Begin to write poetry
Mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble
What do you get: PROFIT!
Re:Chance *is* significant, given the consequences
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 1
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.[snip]
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
Uhm... OK
News at seven: Sun might fart and obliterate Solar System.
It's a potiential risk, but what are you going to do about it anyways? And what are you going to do about the asteroid as well? (And no, you can't hire Bruce Willis...;)
I'm a lot more worried about the unwashed masses than I am a disaster that I can't control (although I suppose I can't really control the unwashed masses either; that takes money... =)
Mature? This is war you twit. These morons have declared war on the digital citizens of the world and your response is like the British to the German invasion of Poland. Sometimes civilized will get you killed. [emphasis mine]
Uhm... what exactly are you refering to? I'm going to go quickly through this since I don't think your comment is worth my time:
Germany invaded Poland in 1939. On September 3rd 1939, the then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the statement:
``I am speaking to you now from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.''
Britain, France, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada all declared war. That's in 1939 if you're not following me yet.
Note that I didn't say that the USA declared war. They didn't, not until the Japanese humilitated them in Pearl Harbour in 1941.
So don't be bitching about the British not reacting to the German invasion. They had the nuts to get involved; they pulled their weight.
Learn your fucking history. If you're going to blame someone for being ``civilized'' and ``turning the other cheek'' then you'll have to stick to the other side of the ocean.
Quicktime, Windows Media, RealWhatever. They always appear in the task bar and the little icon tray thing at the bottom right. No matter how many times I try to remove the startup items it's guaranteed they will have returned on reboot. Aarrgghh! They even have Control Panel entries. This is software at its most rude and obnoxious. Why does RealWhateverItsCalledThisTime need a goddamned 'Start Center'? What's so special about low quality streamed audio and video that ot needs this special treatment? If every application did this I'd need a 3rd monitor for all the itty bitty icons. No wonder I need 2Gb of RAM!
Whiner. Back in the day we had to remove our startup entries by hand... Since I've got a Win98 box beside me:
Start in Startup; remove everything
Fire up regedit; HKLM -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Run*; remove everything that shouldn't be in there
If you want to be double-paranoid then check WIN.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS
I suppose a certain amount of judgement is needed to determine what can be safely deleted or not. But then again, you've got to learn somehow, eh?;)
"You lost your password huh? That sucks. Keep guessing!"
Now, that's not very pro-active. Take a tip from Simon and use things like "goshimaplonker" or "imaginebeingsostupid". You have to WORK for job satisfaction.
Don Knuth's language web had an interesting feature, the ability to generate documentation from the same source code.
I think coders would be a lot better at commenting their code, and writing documentation if it was all integrated.
Try using perl's POD sometime.
#!/usr/bin/perl
=pod
=head1 USAGE
bah, foo() does bar
=cut
sub foo {... }
I don't know that I'm better at commenting my code given I can integrate my documention into my code, but at least I have one less thing to complain about.:)
This will become more scary in the future, when there is some capability to deal with an asteroid on a collision course. When we get to that point, we'll be complacent and will eventually end up being sucker-punched by one of these asteroids coming "out of the sun".
And what exactly would you do if you did see one of these things approaching anyways?
i'd be the last person to stand up for Microsoft, but a lot of the problem is in the fact that novice users are fooled into thinking they can sysadmin without experience and training, and NOT because the software is deficient. almost any other OS you'd care to mention is vulnerable out of the box, but they are usually aimed at people who know what they are doing and patch them accordingly.
OpenBSD isn't vulnerable out of the box, nor is any OS that doesn't enable outside-accessible services by default. Try a stock install of Win95 if you're in the Microsoft camp. Heck, a default install of Debian doesn't install/enable Apache so why should an install of Win-whatever install/enable IIS?
The problem isn't strictly with the software. It's the decision to enable services by default. More precisely, it's the decision to enable outside-accessible services by default.
If I'm Joe User and I want to run a web server, then let me turn it on myself. Let the motivated users enable the things that they want. Let the motivated users worry about patching and watching for security updates. Why should the average user ever need to be concerned with (say) IIS vulnerabilities?
Slashdot Mirror
i can see into the future... i can see myself not subscribing to your stupid site...
imagine paying to be taco's speling/dupe checker
fwiw, i do love slashdot, but not in that way ;)
and i do know that speling is only correct in the case of mod_speling... ;)
I used to have a 386 lying around as a glorified alarm clock. Since I'm an insomniac (i.e. I don't wake up well because I don't get enough sleep), I used to write alarm clock programs that would require me to do some mentally challenging (but not impossible) work.
I'm also a math major going for my B.Sc so my idea of mentally challenging can be a little bit much sometimes...
I didn't realize how bad it was until I woke up to ``what's the last digit of 7 to the 103 power?''. Easy question to do if you know modular arithmetic and you want to think about it, but first thing in the morning...?
Anyways, the case of the 386 was open (and the alarm was going full bore) so I started throwing stuff at the computer in the hopes that I'd jar something. Eventually there was a loud crackle and my room started to smell like ozone.
Close inspection revealed a penny magnetized between a pair of pins on the motherboard. Turning the power off on the case made the penny fall out of the pins.
Imagine my surprise when the computer actually powered up afterwards... from that point on I would throw pennies from across the room whenever I wanted to get some extra sleep...
`There are better things to do with your time than read slashdot articles.'
A couple products immediately come to mind; excuse the debian-isms:
Konqueror is certainly easier (for me) to get running, YMMV.
Ignore the specific topics for the time being: let's teach students better problem solving skills or better communication skills.
Problem solving skills lets you work better independently and makes you an asset to a team.
Communication skills ensures that you're not wasting team time when you have to ask for help.
Or how about teaching students how to learn (outside of a class)? New technologies emerge all the time. You are going to have to continue to develop your knowledge once you leave the school. School seems to focus on teaching the current technologies, what about future stuff?
Not knowing what purpose the DOM serves isn't going to make you bomb your job interview, but not communicating well certainly will! School should teach employable skills.
...they want their bandwidth back!
The article title reads [H|Cr]acker Insurance
This regex works but I don't think it works for the reasons that the author intended. For example,
The [H|Cr] is a character class matching the single character H, C, r or |.
So this regex will match Hacker Insurance, and Cracker Insurance (bolding indicates what part of the word matches)... it will also match |acker Insurance
I wouldn't normally be so anal but the title involves hackers/crackers... you'd think you'd get the logic right, no?
I would humbly suggest the regex (H|Cr)acker Insurance
If the author was intending some weird regex syntax where [] indicates something other than a character class then I apologize in advance,
5) Trolls who will be constantly broadcasting that, "In Russia, you are the wearable computer...Searching for girls named Natilie and grits...First Shirt Post...Hey is this a first of a beowulf of cloths!"
Slightly off-topic (but I can't help saying it anyways):
In Communist Russia, you don't wear computer, computer wears you!
I used to use random strings in my programs as error messages... I didn't know that you could dump line numbers / file names by using __LINE__ and __FILE__. Anyways, I always picked unusual ones so that I could grep through my source files to pick out the error message.
I realized the error in my ways when I was approached by a confused co-worker who wanted to know what a ``fuzzy apple has red balls'' error message meant ;)
Reasons why your argument sucks:
Weight the scores for each of the blocklist tests to 0. (SpamAssassin works out of the box for most people, obviously not for you; this is why we allow for local configs)
Agreed. You can't really get around that. The spammers can use the same tools as us and customize their marketing to defeat our tools; so we write more tools, they defeat them, etc. We just need to be effective most of the time to make spam protection worthwhile... oh and minimize those false positives too ;)
k, don't give me the ``perl is a slow language'' argument because I flat out don't buy it. Your package manager not being able to deal with perl modules is the fault of your package manager; hrm... I need Time::HiRes, so I apt-get install libtime-hires-perl. Seems to work for me.
And the only reason that I'm not arguing with you here is that (a) I haven't used Bogofilter and (b) it was written by ESR who freaking rocks my world :)
If SpamAssassin doesn't do it for you then don't use it. It seems to do a good job for most of us though.
Unfortunately given human nature, we can't rely on sys admins and end users to patch their boxen. Almost every mechanism I can think of to automate this process either calls for automatically updating machines (which sucks if a patch breaks an untested scenario and also may need some legal exemptions) or some similar mechanisms to enable computers to help themselves
Uhm... apt-get dist-upgrade anyone?
And yes, you can put that in a cron job so that the machine will auto-upgrade...
And if your OS doesn't offer you something that simple... ;)
I can't help but wonder that if regular concentrated sunlight can produce good results then can regular concentrated incandescent or fluorescent lights also produce good results. It seems to me that this is a spread-spectrum vs. coherent light proof-of-concept since there's nothing particularly special about sunlight itself (other than being free and bright)
Uhm... maybe the fact that the Sun has got a heck of a lot more wattage than any man-made light is significant?
I know it makes a heck of a lot of difference to those outdoor ... tomatoes... that we grow here in British Columbia. There's really no comparing man-made light to sunlight...
Begin to write poetry
Mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble
What do you get: PROFIT!
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.[snip]
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
Uhm... OK
News at seven: Sun might fart and obliterate Solar System.
It's a potiential risk, but what are you going to do about it anyways? And what are you going to do about the asteroid as well? (And no, you can't hire Bruce Willis... ;)
I'm a lot more worried about the unwashed masses than I am a disaster that I can't control (although I suppose I can't really control the unwashed masses either; that takes money... =)
Mature? This is war you twit. These morons have declared war on the digital citizens of the world and your response is like the British to the German invasion of Poland. Sometimes civilized will get you killed. [emphasis mine]
Uhm... what exactly are you refering to? I'm going to go quickly through this since I don't think your comment is worth my time:
Germany invaded Poland in 1939. On September 3rd 1939, the then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the statement:
Britain, France, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada all declared war. That's in 1939 if you're not following me yet.
Note that I didn't say that the USA declared war. They didn't, not until the Japanese humilitated them in Pearl Harbour in 1941.
So don't be bitching about the British not reacting to the German invasion. They had the nuts to get involved; they pulled their weight.
Learn your fucking history. If you're going to blame someone for being ``civilized'' and ``turning the other cheek'' then you'll have to stick to the other side of the ocean.
(FWIW I'm not British, I'm Canadian)
Quicktime, Windows Media, RealWhatever. They always appear in the task bar and the little icon tray thing at the bottom right. No matter how many times I try to remove the startup items it's guaranteed they will have returned on reboot. Aarrgghh! They even have Control Panel entries. This is software at its most rude and obnoxious. Why does RealWhateverItsCalledThisTime need a goddamned 'Start Center'? What's so special about low quality streamed audio and video that ot needs this special treatment? If every application did this I'd need a 3rd monitor for all the itty bitty icons. No wonder I need 2Gb of RAM!
Whiner. Back in the day we had to remove our startup entries by hand... Since I've got a Win98 box beside me:
I suppose a certain amount of judgement is needed to determine what can be safely deleted or not. But then again, you've got to learn somehow, eh? ;)
If that doesn't help you then STFW
Now, that's not very pro-active. Take a tip from Simon and use things like "goshimaplonker" or "imaginebeingsostupid". You have to WORK for job satisfaction.
What about the old standby, I-D-TEN-T?
So how will this impact the whole GIF vs. PNG thing?
GIF's continue to be bad; PNG's continue to be good
Ignoring the philosophical reasons, PNG's are better:
- (In my experience) PNG's are smaller
- They support a variety of compression standards (see pngcrush)
- They support a larger number of colors. GIF's used a 8 bit palette; PNG's can do truecolor, greyscale or 8 bit palette
- They support animation (through the related MNG standard)
- They support transparency through alpha channels. Alpha channels are a very good thing that I could rant and rave about (but I won't
;) - They support gamma correction
- They support more intelligent interlacing than GIF's
See http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html for more information, if you're so inclined.Let's not start 'emacs vs. vi' or 'us vs. them' wars again.
Oh, that's it! Fscking slashdot and its U.S.-centric comments. ;)
BTW, why is every discussion a `war'? Why isn't a discussion ever a skirmish, conflict, sortie, engagement, etc?
Don Knuth's language web had an interesting feature, the ability to generate documentation from the same source code.
I think coders would be a lot better at commenting their code, and writing documentation if it was all integrated.
Try using perl's POD sometime.
#!/usr/bin/perl
... }
=pod
=head1 USAGE
bah, foo() does bar
=cut
sub foo {
I don't know that I'm better at commenting my code given I can integrate my documention into my code, but at least I have one less thing to complain about. :)
FWIW, you can measure gasoline, ethanol, whatever in terms of calorie consumption as well. IIRC, a calorie is just a unit of heat.
And don't tell me that Fred didn't generate his share of methane after eating those bronto burgers! :)
...when I can get a Lego model of a singularity
I remember discovering __LINE__ and __FILE__ when I was doing some perl debugging. It was handy to do stuff like:
do(something()) or die("Failed on line " . __LINE__);
Of course, then I had this idea of using a debugging function (this is before I knew of warn,croak,carp, et al). So I happily wrote my function
sub debug { die("Failed on line " . __LINE__); }
And then spent hours trying to figure out why my code always failed on line 78, which happened to be where the debug() function lived. D'oh!
This will become more scary in the future, when there is some capability to deal with an asteroid on a collision course. When we get to that point, we'll be complacent and will eventually end up being sucker-punched by one of these asteroids coming "out of the sun".
And what exactly would you do if you did see one of these things approaching anyways?
i'd be the last person to stand up for Microsoft, but a lot of the problem is in the fact that novice users are fooled into thinking they can sysadmin without experience and training, and NOT because the software is deficient. almost any other OS you'd care to mention is vulnerable out of the box, but they are usually aimed at people who know what they are doing and patch them accordingly.
OpenBSD isn't vulnerable out of the box, nor is any OS that doesn't enable outside-accessible services by default. Try a stock install of Win95 if you're in the Microsoft camp. Heck, a default install of Debian doesn't install/enable Apache so why should an install of Win-whatever install/enable IIS?
The problem isn't strictly with the software. It's the decision to enable services by default. More precisely, it's the decision to enable outside-accessible services by default.
If I'm Joe User and I want to run a web server, then let me turn it on myself. Let the motivated users enable the things that they want. Let the motivated users worry about patching and watching for security updates. Why should the average user ever need to be concerned with (say) IIS vulnerabilities?