1) Use a code book. Something with a concordence is good, though if you have the book in flat text you can easily make a concordence. Then you could write "fungal:17" to mean "staple" if "staple" (the word you intended) occured N words after (for some pre-agreed N) the seventeenth occurance of "fungal". There are a number of cute ways you could encode seventeen, and it's relatively easy to make N vary as well. Since this is "security through obscurity" you might as well have fun with it.
2) If you are going to be hand writing the messages as well, you may want to use out of band information (letter shapes, mispellings (with & without crossing out, etc.), line breaks, etc.) to either carry information or make it appear that you have hidden information & thus confuse the issue.
3) Split the message (e.g. every third word, etc.) in interesting ways.
4) Play Simon-says; send messages that say things you might have said, but that your recipient knows to ignore because they lack some feature.
Etc., etc. The list is pretty long, and success mostly depends on doing Odd Things the Bad Guys don't expect, and avoiding the Dumb Things that they will see right through.
For some people the mouse is problematic; having a keyboard alternative for almost all mouse actions (GIMP, etc. may have to be excluded) can make a huge difference in useability. It also makes it easier to interface with proxy programs (interface scripting) which can be very useful when constructing alternate physical interfaces.
I thought the slowing down of the pioneers/voyagers had been attributed to the emission of radiation from a radiator on the craft?
Last report I heard was that waste heat was considered unlikely, because of symmetry (probe vs. probe) & energy budget. Can't find a like to the darned NASA white paper though.
Near the beginning of the article, there were a couple of references to Fourier analysis being ill-equipped to deal with transient components in signals. It also mentions this being related to the Heisengberg Uncertainty Principle...
My first impression when they mentioned "transients" and "crappy" was the Gibbs phenomenon. Is this what they were talking about, and more importantly, is the Gibbs phenomenon caused by the H.U.P.?
It's the other way around; HUP (which is physics) is caused by the fact that you can't extrapolate the full shape of a wave from a small piece of it (which is math).
A good general rule of thumb: there are many examples of math causing physics, but there are no known cases of physics causing math.
erm, photocopy? If there aren't two copies of your contract, signed by both "parties" one of which the employer has and one which you keep - then I don't know what the hell you are doing.
Keeping them honest. In one case I've heard of, the employer took all the contracts at signing and returned them to the new employee about a week later in a nice package--minus the modifications. Looking closely, she noticed that they looked laser printed, including the signatures. When she asked about this, she was told that contracts were routinely scanned into the company's "document retrieval system" and "since they never change" the first umpteen pages were only stored once. Only the signature page was stored per-employee.
At this point she had no record that the changes had been made, or even (apart from her memory) what they had been. A photocopy won't trump an original, but sure beats the absense of any record.
company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment
Just strike it out, and change it to:
company owns the rights to code written during working hours and in direct furtherance of any tasks assigned by the company
Don't forget to keep a photocopy of the modified contract!
An even better solution: many such contracts have a space for exceptions (e.g., in case you are already bound by the terms of a previous employer's contract). Just put in something like "excluding work on software distributed under licenses (GPL, etc.) that would otherwise conflict with the terms of this contract."
If they object, just ask (with an innocent face) "do you really want to get the company's IP tangled up with the GPL? I think we should keep them seperate, don't you?" Ten gets you one they will shudder and agree to the exclussion.
If they try to say you can't work on open source projects, put the innocent look back on and say "is it really company policy to prohibit employees from doing community service on their own time? I find that rather...unusual."
It looks interesting, but after playing with it a while your plugin crashes Internet Explorer 5.50 under NT (and perhaps would crash others), leaving lots of pieces-parts scattered around the screen.
Sorry, no. I'm not hiring at the moment--a year and a half ago or so I was in the awful state of being both desperate and picky, but the last year or so there have been a lot of good people available. It's tempting to over extend, but I made that mistake once a few decades back and don't care to repeat it.
My "productivity" is currently being measured strictly by the number of hours I am in the office, rather than output (volume), quality (as nebulous as that can be) or other results. Yes, I do have the ability to work from my home office, but that does not count as productive time, so I don't do it any more.
Gack, that bites. I'll bet your "office" has little mid-numbing gray head-high partitions made out of pressed wood and carpet too. When I was last serving time in a minimum securi^h^h^h^h programing in a "cube farm" I managed to stay productive with headphones and pride in my work (internalized), but I hear it has gotten worse. I'm impressed that anyone manages to be productive in corporate America these days. All I can offer is "hang in there"--or, I suppose, bail out. In any case, best wishes.
Metric as a measure of programmer productivity are crap, agreed. Metrics are not intriniscally bad however. One good use for metrics is to use them to identify 'hot spots' of potential trouble when doing QA reviews of code... saves you some time reading all of the code so that you can concentrate on the places which may well be badly wrong.
Agreed. There are all sorts of nifty tricks you can do with objective things like code, mud, starlight, or prime numbers, because you can make statements about them that can be disproved by testing. If you say "most of the time is being spent here" and someone else says "no, the problem is that this routine is recomputing the value of 12 each time" it is posible to test and see who is right.
My objection is to trying to use "objective" metrics on subjects like programers that know you are measuring them and thus can change their behaviour to get "good" scores without actually doing what you want. In general it isn't possible to easily disprove statements in such systems (it would probably make the legal system much simpler if you could) and I object to metrics that pretend you can.
You need metrics to prove to clients that you can perform based upon YOUR schedule estimates, not thiers. (and we all know their estimates are "we want it done yesterday!")
First off, metrics don't "prove" anything. But in any case, this generally doesn't come up because I don't discuss schedules with clients. I've found it is counter productive.
The closest I'm willing to come is something like:
Them: Can you have Wazzle-woo ready be the time our contract with XYZ corp come up for renewal?
Me: We'll give you best-build-to-date a month ahead of time, and you can decide if you want to go live with it. That gives us time to make any small cleanups.
Them: What if we don't like it?
Me: Then you go ahead with XYZ for another year and you don't owe me a dime.
If you think about it, the only reason I wouldn't be willing to work like this is if I expected to fail. Which I don't.
Be careful when you have to fire someone. I guess you will have to give a reason, and if you touch the subject of "You lack XYZ", your current employees when talking with the former will know your reasons.
There are a couple of things you can do to minimize this problem:
Be very careful who you hire, to reduce the risk that you will ever need to fire them.
Make sure your team has frank, open communication between all members. Don't "raise mushrooms," no matter what.
Have a "no surprises" policy and stick to it; if someone isn't working out, make sure they know, and know why. Ninety nine times out of a hundred they will either get their act together or decide that they'd be happier doing something else, somewhere else. You can help them in either case. One time out of a hundred they'll be stupid about it (e.g. "If you let that $%#@#!@ touch my code again I'll burn this place to the ground" or "I don't care if you're all writing lisp, I'm writing VB. So there") and you'll have no trouble documenting cause.
If you aren't careless (and aren't in France) it shouldn't be a problem.
There are many other ways of measuring programmer productivity. As a programmer and manager-of-programmers, I hold that they all have one feature in common: they are worse than useless.
Having any defined metric is (IMHO) a Bad Thing in the long run, for the simple reason that people will sooner or later start gaming the metric. If you reward lines of code you get lots of lines of code. If you reward feature points you get lots of features. For a while I tried more abstract things like "user satisfaction," but that started drifting into the "The Customer Is Always Right" syndrom, with all the feature creep and bloat that goes with it. Using "my satisfaction as your manager" is even worse; brown-nosers are a danger to anyone undertaking a team effort with any element of risk.
So I started wondering: do I realy need to measure productivity at all? Why do I care? The bottom line was, I don't care. I'm not interested in "producivity" any more than I am in "attendence." At this point, I tell people if you want to know what your score is, play a game, open an on line stock market account, or post messages on a web page that keeps track of karma. In this team, the focus is on getting the job done, not on keeping score.
The reason I replied to your original comment was that you implied that the work wasn't useful, or wasn't as much of a breakthrough as Adleman claims
I assume you are refering to the post by Hydra; my only prior post on this topic was a reply to you, not visa versa.
Saying that they only solved a single instance isn't relevant: they have a method that works on any 3-SAT problem for which they can construct a long enough DNA chain to represent an assignment, and they have an implementation that actually finds the solution.
But (I claim) they have only distributed the work, adjusting the time required by factors that depends on things like:
The number of DNA strands they use (which goes up roughly as the cube of the liniar scale of their reaction chamber(s), or linarly with cost of reagents, and goes down liniarly with n.
The length of time that it takes two strands to bind (liniar with length, IIRC).
Chance of mismatch (best case coding, liniar with length, but could easily turn into a birthday problem).
Etc.
Note that these are all polynomial factors, and some of them work against you; you haven't really changed the NP-ness of the problem. Yes, this is cool work, and I'm glad they are doing it; no, it doesn't affect the math, any more than faster CPU's (for which I am also glad) do. To me, a "breakthrough" would be something like cracking NPC or proving that that was impossible. Everything else is just technology.
You are missing the point: NP complete problems (like 3-SAT, which is what they are solving with this DNA computer) are incredibly difficult for serial computers to solve.
Not quite. If you have a class of problems, characterized by some parameter n, then for large enough n, the problems in a class that is NP will get harder with increasing n faster than they would if the class was P.
But for any particular instance of a class of problems, it doesn't really matter what the class is--in fact, you can construct example problems that would be NP if generalized in one way, P if generalized another, or even constant time if you choose a perverse "generalization" (e.g., n=date on which the question is posed).
Saying that the problem was NPC is a red herring; what they are actually doing is making a time/space tradeoff which would be hard of conventional computers, and then solving a particular example problem (not the class of problems).
-- MarkusQ
Re:I don't think there is a problem
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
I guess we would start to see problems if the advertising executives discover they can pay the bloggers a few tens of dollars each to put their company at the top of the ranking...
And how much would it cost to reach and negotiate with each J. Random Blogger? The transaction cost would be an order of magnitude higher, and so you are looking at more like hundreds of thousands of dollars to move one site up in the rankings.
So, you might suppose, why not do something in bulk? Negotiate with ISPs (say) to link to your site from all of their free web pages or something. But then you are going to have the same pattern as regular webvertizements, and be easy to filter.
I'm not worried about Google keeping up with this sort of stuff; they've faced worse.
-- MarkusQ
Re:I don't think there is a problem
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 1
There are networks of advertisers who run this software that generates pages with links that push up the Google rating for whoever is paying for those words.
1) That isn't what the article was talking about, and 2) it doesn't seem to work in the long term; Google seems to be fine.
I've seen people use this to push their e-commerce affiliate sites higher in the Google ranks. One of them got his site to come back as the first return for "etoys" -- higher than the actual etoys.com site!
I don't think there is a problem
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What they are reporting as a problem may not be. Google is raising sites in the rankings if large numbers of bloggers link to them--but they only do that if they like the link for some reason. What we have are lots of individuals (who many people respect at least enough to read occasionally) all saying, in effect, I find this interesting, and you might too.
We don't have some advertising hack sitting behind a desk on Madison Ave. saying "Make it so" and pushing a site to the top of Google. The only ways X-10 or mulesex.com or whatever could benifit from this are 1) as a joke, or 2) because they posted something that a wide variety of people liked.
This is how Google is supposed to work. So, where's the problem?
P.S. I just noticed that the original post is now at 5. When I gave it a "+1 Funny on the MQR standard" it was at 1, and had fallen to 0 (IIRC) by the time I had submitted. I'd like to think that my MQR-mod helped get attention to a deserving post that would likely otherwise have languished unnoticed at zero. At least, so far as I can tell, many moderators only read (and thus only moderate) posts that are above zero.
So I wonder...did you, my shy critic, only notice the post because I noticed it first? That may help answer your question as to whether anyone cares about my opinion.
Thanks for the "+1", even though a pseudo-mod from an AC is rather thin currency. As a Nero Wolfe fan, I'm gratified to see someone else who considers "Conceited" as a positive mod.
Since when did you become Slashdot's resident humour analyst, anyway?
I think it was sometime in late 1998, early 1999, back when I was "MQR" instead of "MarkusQ".
I don't think anyone cares how funny you rate a joke by the "MQR Standard."
Fair enough. But if you only want to read things someone cares about, you should go to a library;/. is the wrong place for you if you are bothered by reading things that you suspect no one but the poster cares about.
If it really bothers you, I suppose you could log in and use the friendship system to basnish my posts.
I think it fits as an analogy because essentially what we tried to do was take something that was inherently painful and difficult to use (DRM) and make it as easy, or eaiser, than car door locks are. We wanted to make it so easy to use, that cracking it didn't even cross your mind.
I can respect that, even if I'm not sure how you hoped to accomplish it. When you say "so easy to use that cracking didn't even cross your mind" I understand you to mean something like "so easy to use the way we wanted you to that using it in ways we didn't want you to didn't even cross your mind."
That works as long as the user doesn't intrinsically want to do something that your client (the copyright holder) doesn't want them to. At that point, you have decide who's side you're on--ease of use doesn't enter in to it.
I happen to be of the old "you can't copyright a number" school. I hold that the whole concept of "digital rights management" is flawed, since there is not (IMHO) any such thing as digital rights to be managed. *smile* I think people should be allowed to count as high as they like, without being expected to pay royalties when they reach certain really big numbers. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate when people like yourself try to find a middle ground.
Slashdot Mirror
2) If you are going to be hand writing the messages as well, you may want to use out of band information (letter shapes, mispellings (with & without crossing out, etc.), line breaks, etc.) to either carry information or make it appear that you have hidden information & thus confuse the issue.
3) Split the message (e.g. every third word, etc.) in interesting ways.
4) Play Simon-says; send messages that say things you might have said, but that your recipient knows to ignore because they lack some feature.
Etc., etc. The list is pretty long, and success mostly depends on doing Odd Things the Bad Guys don't expect, and avoiding the Dumb Things that they will see right through.
Weren't you ever twelve?
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Last report I heard was that waste heat was considered unlikely, because of symmetry (probe vs. probe) & energy budget. Can't find a like to the darned NASA white paper though.
-- MarkusQ
1. Drop the undesirable object.
2. Trigger the door.
3. Pick up undesirable object and walk through door.
...at which point you can submit a subsequent story:
-- MarkusQIt's the other way around; HUP (which is physics) is caused by the fact that you can't extrapolate the full shape of a wave from a small piece of it (which is math).
A good general rule of thumb: there are many examples of math causing physics, but there are no known cases of physics causing math.
-- MarkusQ
Cross products & scalars are from vector algebra; "Abelian" is from group theory.
-- MarkusQ
Keeping them honest. In one case I've heard of, the employer took all the contracts at signing and returned them to the new employee about a week later in a nice package--minus the modifications. Looking closely, she noticed that they looked laser printed, including the signatures. When she asked about this, she was told that contracts were routinely scanned into the company's "document retrieval system" and "since they never change" the first umpteen pages were only stored once. Only the signature page was stored per-employee.
At this point she had no record that the changes had been made, or even (apart from her memory) what they had been. A photocopy won't trump an original, but sure beats the absense of any record.
-- MarkusQ
company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment
Just strike it out, and change it to:
company owns the rights to code written during working hours and in direct furtherance of any tasks assigned by the company
Don't forget to keep a photocopy of the modified contract!
An even better solution: many such contracts have a space for exceptions (e.g., in case you are already bound by the terms of a previous employer's contract). Just put in something like "excluding work on software distributed under licenses (GPL, etc.) that would otherwise conflict with the terms of this contract."
If they object, just ask (with an innocent face) "do you really want to get the company's IP tangled up with the GPL? I think we should keep them seperate, don't you?" Ten gets you one they will shudder and agree to the exclussion.
If they try to say you can't work on open source projects, put the innocent look back on and say "is it really company policy to prohibit employees from doing community service on their own time? I find that rather...unusual."
-- MarkusQ
Thanks. I'll check it out.
-- MarkusQ
It looks interesting, but after playing with it a while your plugin crashes Internet Explorer 5.50 under NT (and perhaps would crash others), leaving lots of pieces-parts scattered around the screen.
-- MarkusQ
Can I come work for you?
Sorry, no. I'm not hiring at the moment--a year and a half ago or so I was in the awful state of being both desperate and picky, but the last year or so there have been a lot of good people available. It's tempting to over extend, but I made that mistake once a few decades back and don't care to repeat it.
My "productivity" is currently being measured strictly by the number of hours I am in the office, rather than output (volume), quality (as nebulous as that can be) or other results. Yes, I do have the ability to work from my home office, but that does not count as productive time, so I don't do it any more.
Gack, that bites. I'll bet your "office" has little mid-numbing gray head-high partitions made out of pressed wood and carpet too. When I was last serving time in a minimum securi^h^h^h^h programing in a "cube farm" I managed to stay productive with headphones and pride in my work (internalized), but I hear it has gotten worse. I'm impressed that anyone manages to be productive in corporate America these days. All I can offer is "hang in there"--or, I suppose, bail out. In any case, best wishes.
-- MarkusQ
Sorry, not at the moment. My two most active projects are in Ruby and Lisp, and neither of them needs anyone at the moment. But thanks for asking.
-- MarkusQ
Agreed. There are all sorts of nifty tricks you can do with objective things like code, mud, starlight, or prime numbers, because you can make statements about them that can be disproved by testing. If you say "most of the time is being spent here" and someone else says "no, the problem is that this routine is recomputing the value of 12 each time" it is posible to test and see who is right.
My objection is to trying to use "objective" metrics on subjects like programers that know you are measuring them and thus can change their behaviour to get "good" scores without actually doing what you want. In general it isn't possible to easily disprove statements in such systems (it would probably make the legal system much simpler if you could) and I object to metrics that pretend you can.
-- MarkusQ
First off, metrics don't "prove" anything. But in any case, this generally doesn't come up because I don't discuss schedules with clients. I've found it is counter productive.
The closest I'm willing to come is something like:
If you think about it, the only reason I wouldn't be willing to work like this is if I expected to fail. Which I don't.-- MarkusQ
There are a couple of things you can do to minimize this problem:
If you aren't careless (and aren't in France) it shouldn't be a problem.-- MarkusQ
Having any defined metric is (IMHO) a Bad Thing in the long run, for the simple reason that people will sooner or later start gaming the metric. If you reward lines of code you get lots of lines of code. If you reward feature points you get lots of features. For a while I tried more abstract things like "user satisfaction," but that started drifting into the "The Customer Is Always Right" syndrom, with all the feature creep and bloat that goes with it. Using "my satisfaction as your manager" is even worse; brown-nosers are a danger to anyone undertaking a team effort with any element of risk.
So I started wondering: do I realy need to measure productivity at all? Why do I care? The bottom line was, I don't care. I'm not interested in "producivity" any more than I am in "attendence." At this point, I tell people if you want to know what your score is, play a game, open an on line stock market account, or post messages on a web page that keeps track of karma. In this team, the focus is on getting the job done, not on keeping score.
-- MarkusQ
I assume you are refering to the post by Hydra; my only prior post on this topic was a reply to you, not visa versa.
Saying that they only solved a single instance isn't relevant: they have a method that works on any 3-SAT problem for which they can construct a long enough DNA chain to represent an assignment, and they have an implementation that actually finds the solution.
But (I claim) they have only distributed the work, adjusting the time required by factors that depends on things like:
Note that these are all polynomial factors, and some of them work against you; you haven't really changed the NP-ness of the problem. Yes, this is cool work, and I'm glad they are doing it; no, it doesn't affect the math, any more than faster CPU's (for which I am also glad) do. To me, a "breakthrough" would be something like cracking NPC or proving that that was impossible. Everything else is just technology.-- MarkusQ
Not quite. If you have a class of problems, characterized by some parameter n, then for large enough n, the problems in a class that is NP will get harder with increasing n faster than they would if the class was P.
But for any particular instance of a class of problems, it doesn't really matter what the class is--in fact, you can construct example problems that would be NP if generalized in one way, P if generalized another, or even constant time if you choose a perverse "generalization" (e.g., n=date on which the question is posed).
Saying that the problem was NPC is a red herring; what they are actually doing is making a time/space tradeoff which would be hard of conventional computers, and then solving a particular example problem (not the class of problems).
-- MarkusQ
And how much would it cost to reach and negotiate with each J. Random Blogger? The transaction cost would be an order of magnitude higher, and so you are looking at more like hundreds of thousands of dollars to move one site up in the rankings.
So, you might suppose, why not do something in bulk? Negotiate with ISPs (say) to link to your site from all of their free web pages or something. But then you are going to have the same pattern as regular webvertizements, and be easy to filter.
I'm not worried about Google keeping up with this sort of stuff; they've faced worse.
-- MarkusQ
There are networks of advertisers who run this software that generates pages with links that push up the Google rating for whoever is paying for those words.
1) That isn't what the article was talking about, and 2) it doesn't seem to work in the long term; Google seems to be fine.
I've seen people use this to push their e-commerce affiliate sites higher in the Google ranks. One of them got his site to come back as the first return for "etoys" -- higher than the actual etoys.com site!
It doesn't seem to be working now.
-- MarkusQ
What they are reporting as a problem may not be. Google is raising sites in the rankings if large numbers of bloggers link to them--but they only do that if they like the link for some reason. What we have are lots of individuals (who many people respect at least enough to read occasionally) all saying, in effect, I find this interesting, and you might too.
We don't have some advertising hack sitting behind a desk on Madison Ave. saying "Make it so" and pushing a site to the top of Google. The only ways X-10 or mulesex.com or whatever could benifit from this are 1) as a joke, or 2) because they posted something that a wide variety of people liked.
This is how Google is supposed to work. So, where's the problem?
-- MarkusQ
So I wonder...did you, my shy critic, only notice the post because I noticed it first? That may help answer your question as to whether anyone cares about my opinion.
+1 Conceited on the AC Standard
Thanks for the "+1", even though a pseudo-mod from an AC is rather thin currency. As a Nero Wolfe fan, I'm gratified to see someone else who considers "Conceited" as a positive mod.
Since when did you become Slashdot's resident humour analyst, anyway?
I think it was sometime in late 1998, early 1999, back when I was "MQR" instead of "MarkusQ".
I don't think anyone cares how funny you rate a joke by the "MQR Standard."
Fair enough. But if you only want to read things someone cares about, you should go to a library; /. is the wrong place for you if you are bothered by reading things that you suspect no one but the poster cares about.
If it really bothers you, I suppose you could log in and use the friendship system to basnish my posts.
-- MarkusQ
I think that Torvalds guy should give more consideration to how he names his creations, like the GNU guys do.
*laugh* I can see three ways this statement could be taken, all of them collectively funny.
What I don't see is why anyone would mod it "flamebait"...
-- MarkusQ
I can respect that, even if I'm not sure how you hoped to accomplish it. When you say "so easy to use that cracking didn't even cross your mind" I understand you to mean something like "so easy to use the way we wanted you to that using it in ways we didn't want you to didn't even cross your mind."
That works as long as the user doesn't intrinsically want to do something that your client (the copyright holder) doesn't want them to. At that point, you have decide who's side you're on--ease of use doesn't enter in to it.
I happen to be of the old "you can't copyright a number" school. I hold that the whole concept of "digital rights management" is flawed, since there is not (IMHO) any such thing as digital rights to be managed. *smile* I think people should be allowed to count as high as they like, without being expected to pay royalties when they reach certain really big numbers. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate when people like yourself try to find a middle ground.
-- MarkusQ