The story further notes that White is the sort of young, blogosphere-savvy manager that Microsoft needs if it hopes to outrun Google, and his departure raises questions about the company's ability to retain Web 2.0 talent.
Oh, please. Trying to assert that the resignation of one blog-savvy employee "questions the company's ability to retain Web 2.0 talent" is just sensationalism. Microsoft is doing a fine job of shooting itself in the foot, all by itself, without anyone publishing hyperbole.
I just went through Apple's Flash Crowd-impaired web site to register as an iPhone developer and download the SDK (2.1GB, BTW). I had an ADC (Apple Developer Connection) account, so it was pretty painless. Part of the process, though, was to agree to separate terms and conditions for iPhone software development. One of the items in the agreement caught my eye:
9. Apple Independent Development. Nothing in this Agreement will impair Apple's right to develop, acquire, license, market, promote or distribute products, software or technologies that perform the same or similar functions as, or otherwise compete with any other products, software or technologies that you may develop, produce, market, or distribute. In the absence of a separate written agreement to the contrary, Apple will be free to use any information, suggestions or recommendations you provide to Apple for any purpose, subject to any applicable patents or copyrights.
It's not really all that unusual, I guess. But the knowledge that I just agreed to a document that says, in part, "Hey, Apple! Feel free to rip off this cool idea of mine!" is a bummer.
Superprogrammers, who are seem to be consensually defined here as "someone who writes the right code at the right time in the right time," can most certainly dislike Windows, Vista, Linux, Macintosh, COBOL, whatever. They can dislike anything they want to. The important point here is that superprogrammers deliver what you need, when you need it.
Someone who is truly amazing at getting the most out of a LAMP web site isn't necessarily the best person to write a first-person shooter in C++. They're superstars in one arena, not all arenas, and maybe not your arena. In that case, they aren't a superprogrammer to you.
This "game" should not even be played in the United States of America. The fact that you feel the need to hide that which need not be hidden is a true metric of just how far the U.S. has gone down the wrong road.
If the U.S. government was a spouse, the entire world would be telling us to get a divorce on the grounds of an abusive relationship.
One point that seems to be missed in these comments is the evolution of the device used to create the messages. Yes, IM has been around for a very long time in one form or another. term-chat and friends were functionally the same thing as the modern IM client, but you had to sit in front of a terminal to use it. The IM clients we're talking about here are built into highly-mobile devices: cell phones. That is the biggest difference between Then and Now.
We've taken a communication endpoint and turned it into a portable, cheap, massed-produced, (relatively) easy-to-use device. Cheap enough and useful enough for parents to give to their kids. The kids validate the device's usefulness by actually using the thing, and they use it all the time because they can. IM on a cell phone is useful to them and they don't have to block out a bunch of time to sit in front of a terminal to use it.
Slashdot readers sit in front of a computer a lot throughout the day. When we want to communicate with someone electronically we use either email or a chat client, depending on our need at the time, and we can choose the appropriate tool because we can. Exactly like the kids and their phone-based IM clients. Personally, I use email when I want to communicate something to someone and use chat when I want to communicate with someone (have a conversation).
Anyway, this evolution will probably continue in ways we can't really forecast. And it will all be good, for those people who use it.
If you care how the forces and particles are supposed to be embedded into his group, it's like this. You start with a non-compact real form of E8. You embed a G2 into it. Its centralizer is a non-compact version of F4. Now, you embed the strong SU(3) into the G2 while the non-compact F4 acts as the source of a "graviweak" SO(7,1) group that contains SO(3,1), a "gauge group" that is now fashionable in the crackpot circles to "describe" gravity, and SO(4), their source of cargo cult electroweak symmetry.
Of course, this group plays a different role (in the vielbein formulation of general relativity) than the Yang-Mills groups and the fact that these two kinds of a group cannot be merged is the content of the Coleman-Mandula theorem to be discussed at the end of my text. Moreover, the fermions clearly can't arise from the connection because they have a different spin and statistics and they don't transform in the adjoint representation. For people like A. Garrett Lisi, it is not hard to unify everything with everything else because they don't know any difference between different concepts in physics.
Now I know how my wife feels when my friends come over and we talk shop.
The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.
I had no clue what MERL was. It's Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Google turned up their web page easily enough. I recommend that anyone else not familiar with them peruse the 'Projects' section on the site. It seems rather impressive, at least with the few minutes I gave it just now.
Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said.
I'm disturbed by George Bush's "signing statements." I'm disturbed by the Patriot Act. I'm disturbed by Rules of Engagement at Guantanamo Bay.
Most of this article is pretty good, but I disagree with one of the early bits about supporting Macs in a PC-oriented office:
For Publicis Group, the Macs have higher total cost of ownership. This is because of the particular hardware configurations and the company's corporate culture, which calls for more intense support on the Mac side.
The article goes on to say that some of that may be because these particular Mac users whine a lot and need more help (my words), but also "... due to the nature of the tools we use on the Mac."
This contradicts both my experience and the experience of an awful lot of tech support people I know. In PC-oriented offices where Macs are used, the tech support folks rarely have to fiddle with the Macs. The Mac apps don't seem to cause any more problems than the PC apps, so the support costs are about the same. Maybe Publicis Group is a bit more PC-oriented than the CIO is willing to admit?
Are we seeing the stumbling of the Microsoft Juggernaught with the slow adoption of Windows Vista?
Are you perhaps reading just a little too much into these events in the interest of journalistic sensationalism? Is an article on Inquirer.net really worth referencing anywhere else on the internet?
I don't like Microsoft, and I gleefully read all about Vista's "innovations" and the Zune's "features" and laugh. But this article is just a little too opinionated to make worthwhile.
Yes, but does it make you a safer driver? Perfect lines and last-minute braking don't translate well off the track.
Actually, it does make you a safer driver, eventually. Games like Gran Turismo -- simulators, not arcade-style driving games -- teach technique. Anyone who plays those games also learns that the technique changes from car to car. Front- or rear-wheel drive, weight and weight distribution, tire size and quality, etc. all affect the application of the technique. The same is true when you jump from GT to your real-world car: It's different. You play around a bit with the handling of your real car and you will learn how it handles in more "extreme" circumstances. This learning directly translates into a better understanding of your car and how it behaves. Real extreme circumstances (such as accidents) don't surprise you nearly as much, and you are therefore much less likely to do something stupid and make a bad situation worse.
The way I see it, over-confidence is the root problem with drunk drivers.
You're absolutely right: Drunk drivers should not be confident. But that's not what we're talking about, here.
Remote control systems should simply augment human control systems. In this scenario, the human control system is much more effective. Specifically, "passengers beating the living shit out of all hijackers."
Car: "You are about to apply the brakes. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Allow."
Car: "The brakes are about to be applied. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Allow!"
Car: "The car is about to slow down. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Allow, dammit!"
Car: "The car is about to hit that truck. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Shit!"
Crunch
The right to privacy is underrated
on
The Privacy Candidate
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Would you consider a candidate's stand on privacy important enough to sway your vote?
Not only would it sway my vote, but a positive stance on privacy would damn-near guarantee it. Over the years, the U.S. government has eroded its citizens' rights to the point of absurdity. This latest president has only made a bad situation worse.
There are other issues at stake, of course, but none quite as dear as those that hit close to home. I'm tired of watching my privacy dwindle away, and I want it to stop.
You are quite right about APE's implementation. I plead guilty to thinking I knew more about APE's internal structure than I actually do. I have to say, though, that using mach_inject and mach_override to patch code is somewhat scarier than using Objective-C's dynamic dispatching when you take into consideration that APE supports a plug-in methodology.
For those of you who don't know about APE: There exists in the OS X framework this concept of enabling alternate input mechanisms for already-installed applications. The mechanism is the InputManager. A properly-constructed bundle is simply copied to a designated location and the OS will happily load it whenever an application is launched. The bundle is loaded as part of the application, and the bundle has access to the application's internals. Some good information on InputManagers can be found on CocoaDev.
The "designated location" is actually one of several:/Library/InputManagers/ or ~/Library/InputManagers/. In other words, it doesn't take special privileges to make an InputManager bundle active on a given system for a specific user. You do have to have admin privileges to place the bundle into/Library/InputManagers/ so that all applications executed by all users are touched, but that's it.
Objective-C lets objects of one class "pose" as objects from another class. Posing is like dynamic subclassing; method dispatch happens against your class first and then on up to the original class if you didn't implement it or if your method specifically calls the "parent." This is where code injection comes in. You write a new class that poses as some class in the application and intercept the calls; your code starts executing.
Figuring out the application's classes isn't difficult. A free utility like class-dump can be used to grab an OS X application's class and data structure definitions, and from there it's easy write your own posing classes. Lots of bugs arising from injected code is due to sloppiness on the part of the programmer, and some of it is due to an InputManager modifying an application's data at the wrong time (which is easy to do, because the application rightfully believes that it owns its data).
I was going to write something about the security issues this entire scheme raises, spelling out how a nefarious programmer could hijack passwords and the like. I'll leave that to your imagination, though.
Shameless plug: While I didn't use APE, I did use InputManager technology in order to create Concierge (a bookmark manager for Safari, in the form of a drawer).
... part of a growing community of some 40,000 independent developers, all building products using eBay's own application programming interfaces...
In other words, that count represents the total number of people worldwide writing code that interfaces with eBay. That's very different than 40K developers working for eBay.
I don't know of a handheld RFID detector, but I've often thought about what I could do about the increasing use of RFID tags and the potential for misuse (particularly with respect to anyone tracking my actions, purchases, etc.). It seems that it will only be more and more difficult to try to defeat RFID tracking. Given that, I've thought that perhaps sowing disinformation is the better way to go. What about a handheld RFID transmitter, instead? One that simply continuously spews random information at maximum power, overwhelming any embedded RFID chip?
Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast -- so fast that the on-board camera shook alarmingly -- and was able to drive through a mountain, it had turn signals. And Buckaroo used them. This Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer sets a good example for all of us!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really all that unusual, I guess. But the knowledge that I just agreed to a document that says, in part, "Hey, Apple! Feel free to rip off this cool idea of mine!" is a bummer.
Yes, I know. I did agree.
Superprogrammers, who are seem to be consensually defined here as "someone who writes the right code at the right time in the right time," can most certainly dislike Windows, Vista, Linux, Macintosh, COBOL, whatever. They can dislike anything they want to. The important point here is that superprogrammers deliver what you need, when you need it.
Someone who is truly amazing at getting the most out of a LAMP web site isn't necessarily the best person to write a first-person shooter in C++. They're superstars in one arena, not all arenas, and maybe not your arena. In that case, they aren't a superprogrammer to you.
This "game" should not even be played in the United States of America. The fact that you feel the need to hide that which need not be hidden is a true metric of just how far the U.S. has gone down the wrong road.
If the U.S. government was a spouse, the entire world would be telling us to get a divorce on the grounds of an abusive relationship.
We've taken a communication endpoint and turned it into a portable, cheap, massed-produced, (relatively) easy-to-use device. Cheap enough and useful enough for parents to give to their kids. The kids validate the device's usefulness by actually using the thing, and they use it all the time because they can. IM on a cell phone is useful to them and they don't have to block out a bunch of time to sit in front of a terminal to use it.
Slashdot readers sit in front of a computer a lot throughout the day. When we want to communicate with someone electronically we use either email or a chat client, depending on our need at the time, and we can choose the appropriate tool because we can. Exactly like the kids and their phone-based IM clients. Personally, I use email when I want to communicate something to someone and use chat when I want to communicate with someone (have a conversation).
Anyway, this evolution will probably continue in ways we can't really forecast. And it will all be good, for those people who use it.
Now I know how my wife feels when my friends come over and we talk shop.
The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.
I had no clue what MERL was. It's Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Google turned up their web page easily enough. I recommend that anyone else not familiar with them peruse the 'Projects' section on the site. It seems rather impressive, at least with the few minutes I gave it just now.
Erlang's Wikipedia entry is longer than an elevator pitch, but has some decent information. Erlang's primary site is here.
I'm disturbed by George Bush's "signing statements." I'm disturbed by the Patriot Act. I'm disturbed by Rules of Engagement at Guantanamo Bay.
Can we arrest those responsible?
Most of this article is pretty good, but I disagree with one of the early bits about supporting Macs in a PC-oriented office:
The article goes on to say that some of that may be because these particular Mac users whine a lot and need more help (my words), but also "... due to the nature of the tools we use on the Mac."This contradicts both my experience and the experience of an awful lot of tech support people I know. In PC-oriented offices where Macs are used, the tech support folks rarely have to fiddle with the Macs. The Mac apps don't seem to cause any more problems than the PC apps, so the support costs are about the same. Maybe Publicis Group is a bit more PC-oriented than the CIO is willing to admit?
I don't like Microsoft, and I gleefully read all about Vista's "innovations" and the Zune's "features" and laugh. But this article is just a little too opinionated to make worthwhile.
I bought a Macintosh.
Remote control systems should simply augment human control systems. In this scenario, the human control system is much more effective. Specifically, "passengers beating the living shit out of all hijackers."
You: "Allow."
Car: "The brakes are about to be applied. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Allow!"
Car: "The car is about to slow down. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Allow, dammit!"
Car: "The car is about to hit that truck. Cancel or allow?"
You: "Shit!"
Crunch
Not only would it sway my vote, but a positive stance on privacy would damn-near guarantee it. Over the years, the U.S. government has eroded its citizens' rights to the point of absurdity. This latest president has only made a bad situation worse.
There are other issues at stake, of course, but none quite as dear as those that hit close to home. I'm tired of watching my privacy dwindle away, and I want it to stop.
See any serious problems with this story? Sure! "Lack of content" springs to mind.
Thanks for the clarification!
The "designated location" is actually one of several: /Library/InputManagers/ or ~/Library/InputManagers/. In other words, it doesn't take special privileges to make an InputManager bundle active on a given system for a specific user. You do have to have admin privileges to place the bundle into /Library/InputManagers/ so that all applications executed by all users are touched, but that's it.
Objective-C lets objects of one class "pose" as objects from another class. Posing is like dynamic subclassing; method dispatch happens against your class first and then on up to the original class if you didn't implement it or if your method specifically calls the "parent." This is where code injection comes in. You write a new class that poses as some class in the application and intercept the calls; your code starts executing.
Figuring out the application's classes isn't difficult. A free utility like class-dump can be used to grab an OS X application's class and data structure definitions, and from there it's easy write your own posing classes. Lots of bugs arising from injected code is due to sloppiness on the part of the programmer, and some of it is due to an InputManager modifying an application's data at the wrong time (which is easy to do, because the application rightfully believes that it owns its data).
I was going to write something about the security issues this entire scheme raises, spelling out how a nefarious programmer could hijack passwords and the like. I'll leave that to your imagination, though.
Shameless plug: While I didn't use APE, I did use InputManager technology in order to create Concierge (a bookmark manager for Safari, in the form of a drawer).
In other words, that count represents the total number of people worldwide writing code that interfaces with eBay. That's very different than 40K developers working for eBay.
I don't know of a handheld RFID detector, but I've often thought about what I could do about the increasing use of RFID tags and the potential for misuse (particularly with respect to anyone tracking my actions, purchases, etc.). It seems that it will only be more and more difficult to try to defeat RFID tracking. Given that, I've thought that perhaps sowing disinformation is the better way to go. What about a handheld RFID transmitter, instead? One that simply continuously spews random information at maximum power, overwhelming any embedded RFID chip?
Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast -- so fast that the on-board camera shook alarmingly -- and was able to drive through a mountain, it had turn signals . And Buckaroo used them . This Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer sets a good example for all of us!
The actual study appears to be here.
Hindsight is 20/20.