Or buy a digital camera and use the included picture organizing software that my in-laws bought.
Wow, so "mainstream" that you can't even recollect what it's called. Linux reads the pictures from digital cameras, of course.
And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either.
I pay my bills over the Internet from Linux. Maybe you've just picked a backward bank. Mine is http://www.ubs.ch/e/index.html
I really could go on and on, but the point is that Linux is not mainstream and you can't get mainstream software.
You've gone on and on already, but apart from some card games and Reader Rabbit (whatever that is), you haven't cited anything that hasn't comparable functionality available on Linux.
This proposal does not address the problem. Instead it takes the typical union approach of trying to fix wages, combined with a populist "bash the foreigners because they're to blame". For example:
Laid-off H-1B workers must return to their country of origin within 60 days of their unemployment
Typical screw-the-foreigners mentality: what about the H1B worker who's bought a house? You can't usually sell a house in 60 days.
The real problem is simple. It's that companies are allowed to bring in H1Bs when there are already more workers than jobs - as now. With the tech job market the way it is today, the H1B quota should be zero.
A country has the right to limit the number of immigrants. But it does not have a natural right to let people in, then treat them like shit. Of course the INS already does that, but the AFL-CIO proposal seeks to make it even worse.
Legitimate companies can legitimately produce these records in Europe. Nothing wrong, illegal, shady etc about that. Calling these companies "bootleggers" seems libelous to me.
Of course, it is possible that bootleggers will then smuggle the products from the jurisdictions where they are legally produced and may be legally sold, into jurisdictions where they may not legitimately be sold.
1. Fortran is no faster than C++, given decent compilers (Intel C++).
2. The g++ compiler is a pile of crap - it gave execution times more than double the times given by Intel C++. IMHO the difference is more than can reasonably be brushed off by saying that Intel know their own CPU better, or g++ has more features, or whatever the g++ fans will say. A difference as big as this means that - as an optimising compiler - g++ is broken.
1. If you're receiving a salary, you're an employee.
2. Nobody can make you work more hours than you want to. If your employer thinks you aren't doing enough work to justify your salary, they may fire you. But I have to say that in my 30 years in the IT industry, about half of it in the USA and about half in Europe, I have never come across a case of somebody being fired for refusing to work more than 40 hours per week.
3. A lot of young people seem to be very susceptible to peer-group pressure. You see a bunch of people working long hours, and you feel you can't just walk out of the office at 5pm, leaving them all beavering away. When you grow up, you'll realise that you can. Nothing bad will happen to you. You'll just get into the habit of wasting less time during the working day. And you may develop some independence of thought, which will be good for you.
Quick summary: No tech breakthroughs in 2002
on
The Year in Technology
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sadly, the article on technology describes nothing that can really be described as a breakthrough. There were some more little steps towards quantum computing, but this journey did not start in 2002 and certainly did not reach fruition in 2002.
An honest title for the article would have been "No technology breakthroughs in 2002", but that wouldn't have sold any magazines...
At no point in the patent was it explained (clearly... legalese is not good science writing) why high energy ions would be trapped and fuse in such a modest potential well.
I think you may have missed the key idea of the device, which is that the ions are indeed not trapped. Some of the ions which enter the reaction zone collide with other ions and react, but the ones which don't react proceed right on through. They are trapped in the device, (between the inner and outer grids) but not in the reaction zone. As you correctly state, there cannot be an electrostatic potential well inside the volume within the inner grid. Indeed, if the inner grid were perfect, there would be no electric field inside it at all.
Assuming you're running Linux with a 2.4 kernel or later, adding this to your iptables rules is probably the most effective:
iptables -A INPUT -s 204.1.28.0/24 -j DROP
Put it just before the first rule that accepts or logs anything. (I haven't tried it yet - if you're an iptables expert and see a mistake, please post a correction).
I recently went through the process of choosing a toolkit. The ones I tried were FLTK, FOX and wxWindows.
FLTK had what seemed to be a bug in its scrolling - it could have been my code, of course, but I couldn't track it down. They have a mailing list but don't seem to have a helpful community.
FOX had some major inconsistencies between its documentation and its functionality. Nothing one couldn't figure out... but I'd prefer a package where I didn't have to lose time on that.
Finally I settled on wxWindows. So far, it works as advertised. The documentation is quite good.
I drew the following lessons from my experience
1 - For a development tool, good documentation is a must. And it has to describe the way the tool is, not the way it was or the way it might be.
2 - A tool with more users tends to be better debugged than a tool with fewer users. This isn't a general rule (if it were, Microsoft products would be terrific) but within the open-source community I've found it a useful guide.
3 - Features, OO-purity, etc are much less important than (1) and (2) if you have a task to accomplish and limited time.
wxWindows is a "fatter" toolkit than I'd consider ideal, but I could get the job done with it. It has an MFC-like "Application Framework" but you don't have to use it if it's not appropriate for you application.
Does anybody have statistics on what fraction of mag tapes are still readable after 10 years?
In my experience, mag tapes are pretty much worthless as a backup medium even for 5-year storage, but that's based on relatively few tapes and maybe I've just been unlucky. Has anyone stored hundreds of tapes for 10 years and then tried to read some of them?
there are many reasons why a business user my prefer to deploy PGP:
1. Technical support.
You can easily buy technical support for GnuPG and other open-source products. This is another advantage of open-source - support from a small independent company is usually better than support from a big company, even when it's the company that produced the software
The point is that the total cost of a PC is the cost of producing, selling, and delivering it, plus the cost of disposing of it when it becomes trash.
At present in the US (unlike some other countries) only the first 3 of these are paid by the buyer. The last cost, the cost of disposing of it, is paid by the taxpayer, who gets no say in which PC was bought. So market forces will ignore the cost of disposal. A PC which is identical to another, except that it is cheaper to dispose of, will not have an advantage in the marketplace - although for overall economic efficiency, it obviously should have. The solution is to make the buyer pay the total cost instead of just part of it, which is what this measure does (the manufacturer will pass the cost along to the consumer). OK?
In most industries, unions have had a very bad effect in the medium to long term. For one thing, they tend to resist any change in working practices because change usually hurts somebody. On the other had, without change you can't have progress and you can't be flexible in responding to challenges.
However, the following made me think:
If we had a union, do you think that Congress would have been able to pass legislation [dol.gov] that specifically exempted hourly computer professionals from receiving 1.5x overtime pay?
That's not the only example of Congress screwing technical people. I've been in the industry longer than you and can remember when technical people could be independent contractors in the USA. Congress mostly killed that in the 1986 revision of the tax law, which specifically discriminates against technical people. (Section 1706). The UK apparently passed something similar (IR35) last year. Technical people clearly need to have some kind of organization to fight their corner with Congress - whether you call it a "union" or not is not important.
And it shows a remarkable lack of empathy for those of us who may be a little behind you in their geek development. Put it this way. I'm in sales.
Put it this way. You're probably getting paid twice as much as the average technical person, you have better career prospects, and sales skills are not tied to the IT industry. Also your job involves personal contact so cannot be moved to India/Russia/Bangladesh.
Now why was it you needed empathy and understanding again?
luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield..... I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records
The reporter found the address in public records. Can't someone who lives in that county do the same? The address should be widely publicized. This is perfectly legal, and will probably cause some annoyance to the spammer. For example, some annoyed recipients of spam might stuff a lot of junk mail in his mail box, or something.
If you were a foreign government would you rather give money to a) your citizens or b) foreign megacorp ?
You implicitly assume that politicians will do what is best for the people they represent. I wish you were right.
In fact, politicians will push public money towards people who "contribute money" to their re-election funds. Doing the right thing for the voters does win a few votes... but an expensive ad campaign seems to win far more votes. It happens in the US too (DMCA etc).
In this case the "foreign megacorp" (M$) will probably regard a few $million, or even tens of millions, to key Japanese politicians a good investment, since it will make $billions out of a continued monopoly in Japan. This is what really drives political decisions. OS hasn't a chance.
security hole in IE that allows malicious web pages to reformat a hard drive
Surely there's a typo here. If I discover that the computer I'm working on has Windows installed, you're saying that all I need to do to reformat the hard drive is click on one of these web sites?
There is only one technical defense against an exploit at the present time and that is to disable scripting in Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express.
Crap. The simplest and most appropriate technical defense is to switch to another browser. Even Windows users have a choice of browser.
Most people don't recognize the difference between "water-resistant" and "water-proof" when they buy a watch.
That's true, but the worthless piece of crap being discussed isn't even "water resistant". Getting caught outdoors in a sudden rain shower can kill it!
Conclusion: it's not a watch/PDA, it's a throwaway geek toy. $149 for a watch/PDA would be terrific, $149 for a throwaway toy is way over the top.
In the example they use the nonrouted (and nonunique) IP addresses in the 192.168.x.x range. Wouldn't this be a problem if you had 2 groups of people doing this independently within radio range of each other? How unlikely is this in an urban area?
Slashdot Mirror
Valid point - can't anyone convert these files?
Or buy a digital camera and use the included picture organizing software that my in-laws bought.
Wow, so "mainstream" that you can't even recollect what it's called. Linux reads the pictures from digital cameras, of course.
And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either.
I pay my bills over the Internet from Linux. Maybe you've just picked a backward bank. Mine is
http://www.ubs.ch/e/index.html
I really could go on and on, but the point is that Linux is not mainstream and you can't get mainstream software.
You've gone on and on already, but apart from some card games and Reader Rabbit (whatever that is), you haven't cited anything that hasn't comparable functionality available on Linux.
This proposal does not address the problem. Instead it takes the typical union approach of trying to fix wages, combined with a populist "bash the foreigners because they're to blame". For example:
Laid-off H-1B workers must return to their country of origin within 60 days of their unemployment
Typical screw-the-foreigners mentality: what about the H1B worker who's bought a house? You can't usually sell a house in 60 days.
The real problem is simple. It's that companies are allowed to bring in H1Bs when there are already more workers than jobs - as now. With the tech job market the way it is today, the H1B quota should be zero.
A country has the right to limit the number of immigrants. But it does not have a natural right to let people in, then treat them like shit. Of course the INS already does that, but the AFL-CIO proposal seeks to make it even worse.
Now "bootleg" labels can legitimately print ...
Bootleggers don't legitimately print anything.
Legitimate companies can legitimately produce these records in Europe. Nothing wrong, illegal, shady etc about that. Calling these companies "bootleggers" seems libelous to me.
Of course, it is possible that bootleggers will then smuggle the products from the jurisdictions where they are legally produced and may be legally sold, into jurisdictions where they may not legitimately be sold.
1. Fortran is no faster than C++, given decent compilers (Intel C++).
2. The g++ compiler is a pile of crap - it gave execution times more than double the times given by Intel C++. IMHO the difference is more than can reasonably be brushed off by saying that Intel know their own CPU better, or g++ has more features, or whatever the g++ fans will say. A difference as big as this means that - as an optimising compiler - g++ is broken.
If there is an intelligent moderator out there, please mod the parent up.
1. If you're receiving a salary, you're an employee.
2. Nobody can make you work more hours than you want to. If your employer thinks you aren't doing enough work to justify your salary, they may fire you. But I have to say that in my 30 years in the IT industry, about half of it in the USA and about half in Europe, I have never come across a case of somebody being fired for refusing to work more than 40 hours per week.
3. A lot of young people seem to be very susceptible to peer-group pressure. You see a bunch of people working long hours, and you feel you can't just walk out of the office at 5pm, leaving them all beavering away. When you grow up, you'll realise that you can. Nothing bad will happen to you. You'll just get into the habit of wasting less time during the working day. And you may develop some independence of thought, which will be good for you.
Sadly, the article on technology describes nothing that can really be described as a breakthrough. There were some more little steps towards quantum computing, but this journey did not start in 2002 and certainly did not reach fruition in 2002.
...
An honest title for the article would have been "No technology breakthroughs in 2002", but that wouldn't have sold any magazines
At no point in the patent was it explained (clearly ... legalese is not good science writing) why high energy ions would be trapped and fuse in such a modest potential well.
I think you may have missed the key idea of the device, which is that the ions are indeed not trapped. Some of the ions which enter the reaction zone collide with other ions and react, but the ones which don't react proceed right on through. They are trapped in the device, (between the inner and outer grids) but not in the reaction zone. As you correctly state, there cannot be an electrostatic potential well inside the volume within the inner grid. Indeed, if the inner grid were perfect, there would be no electric field inside it at all.
The chip itself is $40.
... plus $70 shipping charge outside Europe, according to their order page
Assuming you're running Linux with a 2.4 kernel or later, adding this to your iptables rules is probably the most effective:
iptables -A INPUT -s 204.1.28.0/24 -j DROP
Put it just before the first rule that accepts or logs anything. (I haven't tried it yet - if you're an iptables expert and see a mistake, please post a correction).
I recently went through the process of choosing a toolkit. The ones I tried were FLTK, FOX and wxWindows.
... but I'd prefer a package where I didn't have to lose time on that.
FLTK had what seemed to be a bug in its scrolling - it could have been my code, of course, but I couldn't track it down. They have a mailing list but don't seem to have a helpful community.
FOX had some major inconsistencies between its documentation and its functionality. Nothing one couldn't figure out
Finally I settled on wxWindows. So far, it works as advertised. The documentation is quite good.
I drew the following lessons from my experience
1 - For a development tool, good documentation is a must. And it has to describe the way the tool is, not the way it was or the way it might be.
2 - A tool with more users tends to be better debugged than a tool with fewer users. This isn't a general rule (if it were, Microsoft products would be terrific) but within the open-source community I've found it a useful guide.
3 - Features, OO-purity, etc are much less important than (1) and (2) if you have a task to accomplish and limited time.
wxWindows is a "fatter" toolkit than I'd consider ideal, but I could get the job done with it. It has an MFC-like "Application Framework" but you don't have to use it if it's not appropriate for you application.
YMMV. I hope my comments help you.
Didn't he create that screwed up version of the keyboard as an alternative to the qwerty keyboard?
No.
He didn't write the symphony called "From the New World" either.
Does anybody have statistics on what fraction of mag tapes are still readable after 10 years?
In my experience, mag tapes are pretty much worthless as a backup medium even for 5-year storage, but that's based on relatively few tapes and maybe I've just been unlucky. Has anyone stored hundreds of tapes for 10 years and then tried to read some of them?
there are many reasons why a business user my prefer to deploy PGP:
1. Technical support.
You can easily buy technical support for GnuPG and other open-source products. This is another advantage of open-source - support from a small independent company is usually better than support from a big company, even when it's the company that produced the software
What is the point!
The point is that the total cost of a PC is the cost of producing, selling, and delivering it, plus the cost of disposing of it when it becomes trash.
At present in the US (unlike some other countries) only the first 3 of these are paid by the buyer. The last cost, the cost of disposing of it, is paid by the taxpayer, who gets no say in which PC was bought. So market forces will ignore the cost of disposal. A PC which is identical to another, except that it is cheaper to dispose of, will not have an advantage in the marketplace - although for overall economic efficiency, it obviously should have. The solution is to make the buyer pay the total cost instead of just part of it, which is what this measure does (the manufacturer will pass the cost along to the consumer). OK?
I can't think of any reason to prefer PGP to GnuPG, and there are some reasons (already pointed out) for preferring GnuPG to PGP.
So, overall, I can't why anyone would use PGP.
Zimmerman made a great contribution, deserves tremendous credit for what he did, but as he says himself, it's all history.
In most industries, unions have had a very bad effect in the medium to long term. For one thing, they tend to resist any change in working practices because change usually hurts somebody. On the other had, without change you can't have progress and you can't be flexible in responding to challenges.
However, the following made me think:
If we had a union, do you think that Congress would have been able to pass legislation [dol.gov] that specifically exempted hourly computer professionals from receiving 1.5x overtime pay?
That's not the only example of Congress screwing technical people. I've been in the industry longer than you and can remember when technical people could be independent contractors in the USA. Congress mostly killed that in the 1986 revision of the tax law, which specifically discriminates against technical people. (Section 1706). The UK apparently passed something similar (IR35) last year. Technical people clearly need to have some kind of organization to fight their corner with Congress - whether you call it a "union" or not is not important.
And it shows a remarkable lack of empathy for those of us who may be a little behind you in their geek development. Put it this way. I'm in sales.
Put it this way. You're probably getting paid twice as much as the average technical person, you have better career prospects, and sales skills are not tied to the IT industry. Also your job involves personal contact so cannot be moved to India/Russia/Bangladesh.
Now why was it you needed empathy and understanding again?
luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield .....
I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records
The reporter found the address in public records. Can't someone who lives in that county do the same? The address should be widely publicized. This is perfectly legal, and will probably cause some annoyance to the spammer. For example, some annoyed recipients of spam might stuff a lot of junk mail in his mail box, or something.
If you were a foreign government would you rather give money to a) your citizens or b) foreign megacorp ?
... but an expensive ad campaign seems to win far more votes. It happens in the US too (DMCA etc).
You implicitly assume that politicians will do what is best for the people they represent. I wish you were right.
In fact, politicians will push public money towards people who "contribute money" to their re-election funds. Doing the right thing for the voters does win a few votes
In this case the "foreign megacorp" (M$) will probably regard a few $million, or even tens of millions, to key Japanese politicians a good investment, since it will make $billions out of a continued monopoly in Japan. This is what really drives political decisions. OS hasn't a chance.
security hole in IE that allows malicious web pages to reformat a hard drive
Surely there's a typo here. If I discover that the computer I'm working on has Windows installed, you're saying that all I need to do to reformat the hard drive is click on one of these web sites?
There is only one technical defense against an exploit at the present time and that is to disable scripting in Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express.
Crap. The simplest and most appropriate technical defense is to switch to another browser. Even Windows users have a choice of browser.
Most people don't recognize the difference between "water-resistant" and "water-proof" when they buy a watch.
That's true, but the worthless piece of crap being discussed isn't even "water resistant". Getting caught outdoors in a sudden rain shower can kill it!
Conclusion: it's not a watch/PDA, it's a throwaway geek toy. $149 for a watch/PDA would be terrific, $149 for a throwaway toy is way over the top.
In the example they use the nonrouted (and nonunique) IP addresses in the 192.168.x.x range. Wouldn't this be a problem if you had 2 groups of people doing this independently within radio range of each other?
How unlikely is this in an urban area?