I do have the right to my opinion that minutes 12.1 to 13.6 and 34.9 to 40.0 contain violence unsuitable for children under 18
Agreed. This strikes me as the moral equivalent of collaborative spam filter databases. And I don't see many people on Slashdot complaining that anti-spam tools are censorship.
buys or rents a DVD and then buys a player to selectively cut parts out of it?
I have been known to fast-forward over boring scenes. And I often skip the "extra scenes" DVD bonus material. Why does that make me an idiot?
Personally, I'd love it if this system were even more open, allowing viewers to choose from a menu of alternative edits loaded from the Internet. My girlfriend, for example, is more sensitive to on-screen violence than I am; she gets wake-up-sweating nightmares from things that don't bother me. When watching some movies with her it'd be nice to see an edit that skips the gratuitous violence that gets put in some movies. Why not allow a thousand flowers to bloom?
Besides, it will butcher movies, not replace the content with milder cuss words like on TV.
Well, that's the difference between an early technology and an evolved one. Gosh, is there anybody here on Slashdot who could improve these technologies?
Censorship is BAD. It always has been and it always will be.
Yes, but this isn't censorship. Censorship is where I tell you what you can see and hear. This is you deciding what you want to see and hear. That's known as consumer choice.
If technologies like this become widely available, then it will weaken the argument for censorship. Right now, people keep "bad" things off of TV because they are public media. This pushes things towards a national lowest common denominator. A bare breast is apparently shocking in some parts of the country, even if here in San Francisco it wouldn't be out of place at an Easter picnic.
But imagine that there's a dial on every TV, radio, and DVD player: G, PG, PG-13, R, Unfiltered. Content producers just add a little metadata to their work, and suddenly things are different: if somebody is shocked by something on their TV, it's their own fault. This would have been impossible in an analog age, but digital media makes this a piece of cake.
Under Windows it doesn't work with dial-up adapters, which means it's useless if you're trying to inspect stuff you're sending over PPTP VPN tunnel. That's not really Ethereal's fault though - it's pcap stuff and issues caused by Windows itself.
Even worse, it doesn't work over the loopback interface. Another one of the zillion sloppy things about Windows that suggests that engineers at Microsoft spend very little time thinking before they write code or refactoring the code they've written.
Sniffing will also not get you anywhere if you are trying to see what happening on a https stream as all you'll see is the encrypted traffic.
That's generally true, but not entirely so. If web developers have the server's private key, they can indeed decrypt HTTPS streams. I once had to do it for a heisenbug on a secure website. You can use the tool ssldump from Eric Rescorla. If you're this deep into SSL, you should certainly buy his book SSL and TLS, which is very helpful.
In college one November I was rummaging around the university's shiny new on-line internal purchasing catalog. (It was Gopher-based, so this would have been circa 1991.) I discovered that you could buy caffeine in half-kilo jars from the Chemistry Stores department for circa $20. I thought, "What a perfect Christmas/final-exam-week gift for my pals!" And I knew they were happy to sell to students, as I'd occasionally buy bucket of liquid nitrogen, for no purpose more legitimate than the amusement of me and the people in my dorm.
But then I took advantage of the school's free Medline access. It turns out the lethal dose of caffeine is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 grams, which is about 50 cups of coffee. So the caffeine may get you before the water does.
Come clean; you're the guy who made up those terms, right? Because as far as I can tell, nobody else uses them. Except as very geeky punchlines, of course.
Once in college, April 1 fell on a weekend, so the maintenance guys generally wouldn't come in. I unscrewed the "tamper-proof" screws on the elevator control panel and rewired it so that all the buttons took you to different floors. It caused glorious mass confusion; with a full elevator all the floors tended to get picked, so it seemed fine, but otherwise seemed pretty random. Monday, when somebody turned up in response to a slew of complaints, I had put everything back, causing yet more confusion.
Ah, I had forgotten how handy those vending machines were. I put together, "Have you seen this child?" spoofs with assorted coworkers and then put them on all the milk cartons in the vending machine.
Did you ever stop to wonder why older or lower-end stuff is so cheap? The people buying the new stuff at much higher prices are essentially subsidizing it.
Well, what they're really subsidizing is the R&D and the factory setup. The very first copy of a new generation of processor costs billions to make; the next one costs 8 or 9 orders of magnitude less. If there aren't enough high-end purchasers to fund the development of faster chips, the old ones won't increase in price, but they won't get much cheaper, either.
Department Secretary: Lifts tall buildings and walks under them, kicks locomotives off the track, catches speeding bullets in her teeth and eats them, freezes water with a single glare, she is God.
You might mistake this for humor. I used to work for a university, and this is dead on. From day 1, be extremely nice and helpful to the secretaries and other admin people; you'll be amazed how much easier it makes your work.
Intelligent people don't argue so much about these best practices, or at least don't fight over them zealously,
Actually, the best practices in our field change much more quickly than in others, so there is indeed a lot of room for reasonable people to differ. But even if there were, as you suggest, one set of obviously best practice, the problem is that practically nobody does them.
Say what you will about XP, but it has created a lot of buzz around testing, something that was a "best practice" in my dad's day, and even now most of the people I interview don't have any experience with. The ones I see who do unit testing regularly have all been influenced by XP.
the people behind it aren't interested in an intelligent, full and honest understanding of the best practices for computer programming
Having met some of them, I'd say you're wrong. But they did see exactly how much dust the books on best practices were gathering, and decided to do something different. Given that it keeps coming up here on Slashdot, clearly they did something right.
Our former CTO was in love with XP. [...]Velocity was one of those concepts used by our CTO to explain why he didn't have to work more than 4 hours per day.
People who like to spew bullshit will use whatever the hot topic is. That's not the fault of the hot topic.
Because it freed him from responsibility from things like designing with scalability in mind.
The way to do this in XP is to write "1000 people use the system simulateously" on a story card and then let the product manager decide when to pay for that.
When it comes up, it's just like any other story card. The product manager and the developers get together and make the acceptance tests, and then the developers do the thing until the tests pass.
If developers are scared that they don't know how to design for scalability, then they can ask the product manager to put that card in early on.
I would never use it for a new software product.
Which is, of course, your choice. But I've used it successfully for three new products. I think that's the best time to use it; getting an existing code base up to XP quality standards can be a long slog.
Why can't the Extreme Programming crowd just call it Extreme Programming (or even 'EP') and not 'XP'?
I used to hate this myself. But honestly, how many of the other agile development methods can you name? The reason that everybody heard about XP is that it has a polarizing name.
So now when I explain it to clients, I say that I consult on agile development methods. I may never even mention XP, but I usually end up introducing a lot of the practices. "XP? You're soaking in it!"
However, totally pushing that reponsability to the customer isn't correct behaviour either. There's ground in the middle that needs to be met. That, by the way, is how other professional industries work - the people you're contracting with are supposed to bring expertise to the table that you don't have (thats why you hired them, after all).
Giving the customer (aka product manager) complete power to decide what gets built does not mean that developers stop advising. It just means that the customer gets the final say.
If the customer can't do the acceptance test, who can?
To a large extent, as a developer, I can, and do.
You can, but you won't do as good a job as a professional product manager will. Most good product managers could also sit down and pound out a little code, but that doesn't mean they should.
And even if you could, you shouldn't. On an XP team, the product managers get to say what to build, but developers get to say how long it takes. This is a delicate balance of power. Allowing one person to make both business and technical decisions is akin to letting the military choose their own budget.
AFAIC, it's the developer's responsibility to figure out what the customer actually wants, by active questioning and other methods, because only the developer knows enough about software development to fully appreciate the engineering issues[...]
True! I work on an XP project, and I help them with stuff like this every day. XP says that the product manager has the power to decide, but everybody should give (and gracefully receive) advice.
and pragmatically, a doofus customer is going to be a doofus customer whether you play passive-aggressive head games with him or not.
No methodology can save you from a doofus customer. But even that case I'd take XP, as weekly iterations help doofuses and their managers see just how dumb they are. (And sometimes, they help arrogant developers see that the customer's aren't so stupid after all.)
But "passive-aggressive head games" is wide of the mark. Next time you're in San Francisco, drop me a line and you can come by and see a good XP shop in action.
1) Because it's our intrinsic human right to think about whatever we want.
FYI, thinking is something you do inside your head. Talking, on the other hand, is an action that can have consequences in the world. It's unfortunate that the urge to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's actions is not quite as intrinsic as the urge to run one's mouth.
OK, so my plan isn't perfect. Can anyone suggest anything better?
Sure. The rule should be that the loser pays the winner's legal bills, but the loser need pay no more to the winner than they paid to their own lawyers.
That way you can control the amount you want to risk, and the maximum exposure is only twice what people risk now.
There are still some slight problems with this (e.g., suits where one of the participants acts at their own lawyer) but I think they're all fixable.
Do the math. If your homebrew system goes down, you will be burning the time of 1000+ people ($60,000) per hour. With those kind of numbers it doesn't pay to do it on the cheap. Get a redundant Cisco system with plenty of power backup.
Or you could use something like this to provide redundant Linux routers on cheap commodity hardware and spend the money saved on getting more backup power.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful.
Don't knock it until you try it. The stellar Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA has pretty much gotten rid of the save command. I don't miss it. Why? Because I always want my work to be saved. The only reason I wouldn't is when using an app with poor undo support.
Excellent, excellent advice. I just wanted to amplify one point:
If any one in your corporation or business insists that you don't need documentation, meeting notes, or contracts, they're either completely naive or planning to screw you over at some point.
Yes, yes, yes! Starting a business is really exciting, and everybody feels like things are going to go great. It's so easy to say, "Gosh, we can do the paperwork later." I have made this mistake myself, and always regretted it.
Take full advantage of that happy initial period to get something written down. It's sort of like having insurance: you get it precisely because you hope to never use it. At the very least, make sure it covers the basics: who puts in what (money, time, connections, etc); who has to do what; how and when people get money out; who is in charge; what happens if there is an unresolvable disagreement. Keep in mind that the partners can always decide to change the agreement later; the agreement just makes clear what people must do when they can't agree.
A lot of the posts here say, "just pay more attention to your penmanship;" if it were that easy he probably would have done it already.
Well, learning to pay attention is actually really hard. Don't think so? Try this basic meditation exercise:
Sit comfortably. Close your eyes half way, so you can still see but aren't focused on anything. Now breathe, slowly and regularly, paying attention to breathing and counting your breaths. Think only of the breathing and the counting. Try to make it through ten breaths without thinking of anything else.
The usual way people go is to think, "One... Two... Three... Hey, I'm doing well... Wait, I just thought that I was doing well! One... Two..."
It took me a few months of practice to be able to focus for even such a short time, and I understand that's pretty typical. But practicing like this did end up helping my handwriting indirectly, as it made it easier to notice that many of my handwriting mistakes came when my attention wandered.
It also helps to pay attention to your breathing. My handwriting is worst in stressful situations. E.g., in front of a bunch of people at a whiteboard. When I notice my writing getting bad, I focus on taking slow, relaxed breaths and making smooth, even letters. It works!
Slashdot Mirror
I do have the right to my opinion that minutes 12.1 to 13.6 and 34.9 to 40.0 contain violence unsuitable for children under 18
Agreed. This strikes me as the moral equivalent of collaborative spam filter databases. And I don't see many people on Slashdot complaining that anti-spam tools are censorship.
buys or rents a DVD and then buys a player to selectively cut parts out of it?
I have been known to fast-forward over boring scenes. And I often skip the "extra scenes" DVD bonus material. Why does that make me an idiot?
Personally, I'd love it if this system were even more open, allowing viewers to choose from a menu of alternative edits loaded from the Internet. My girlfriend, for example, is more sensitive to on-screen violence than I am; she gets wake-up-sweating nightmares from things that don't bother me. When watching some movies with her it'd be nice to see an edit that skips the gratuitous violence that gets put in some movies. Why not allow a thousand flowers to bloom?
Besides, it will butcher movies, not replace the content with milder cuss words like on TV.
Well, that's the difference between an early technology and an evolved one. Gosh, is there anybody here on Slashdot who could improve these technologies?
Censorship is BAD. It always has been and it always will be.
Yes, but this isn't censorship. Censorship is where I tell you what you can see and hear. This is you deciding what you want to see and hear. That's known as consumer choice.
If technologies like this become widely available, then it will weaken the argument for censorship. Right now, people keep "bad" things off of TV because they are public media. This pushes things towards a national lowest common denominator. A bare breast is apparently shocking in some parts of the country, even if here in San Francisco it wouldn't be out of place at an Easter picnic.
But imagine that there's a dial on every TV, radio, and DVD player: G, PG, PG-13, R, Unfiltered. Content producers just add a little metadata to their work, and suddenly things are different: if somebody is shocked by something on their TV, it's their own fault. This would have been impossible in an analog age, but digital media makes this a piece of cake.
Under Windows it doesn't work with dial-up adapters, which means it's useless if you're trying to inspect stuff you're sending over PPTP VPN tunnel. That's not really Ethereal's fault though - it's pcap stuff and issues caused by Windows itself.
Even worse, it doesn't work over the loopback interface. Another one of the zillion sloppy things about Windows that suggests that engineers at Microsoft spend very little time thinking before they write code or refactoring the code they've written.
Sniffing will also not get you anywhere if you are trying to see what happening on a https stream as all you'll see is the encrypted traffic.
That's generally true, but not entirely so. If web developers have the server's private key, they can indeed decrypt HTTPS streams. I once had to do it for a heisenbug on a secure website. You can use the tool ssldump from Eric Rescorla. If you're this deep into SSL, you should certainly buy his book SSL and TLS, which is very helpful.
In college one November I was rummaging around the university's shiny new on-line internal purchasing catalog. (It was Gopher-based, so this would have been circa 1991.) I discovered that you could buy caffeine in half-kilo jars from the Chemistry Stores department for circa $20. I thought, "What a perfect Christmas/final-exam-week gift for my pals!" And I knew they were happy to sell to students, as I'd occasionally buy bucket of liquid nitrogen, for no purpose more legitimate than the amusement of me and the people in my dorm.
But then I took advantage of the school's free Medline access. It turns out the lethal dose of caffeine is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 grams, which is about 50 cups of coffee. So the caffeine may get you before the water does.
Ecstasy can be quite benign if done in moderation and with a good head on your shoulders.
In one good article on this topic, The Economist pointed out that you were more likely to die from a single airline flight than a single dose of MDMA.
You're thinking of Mebibytes and Gibibytes.
Come clean; you're the guy who made up those terms, right? Because as far as I can tell, nobody else uses them. Except as very geeky punchlines, of course.
Once in college, April 1 fell on a weekend, so the maintenance guys generally wouldn't come in. I unscrewed the "tamper-proof" screws on the elevator control panel and rewired it so that all the buttons took you to different floors. It caused glorious mass confusion; with a full elevator all the floors tended to get picked, so it seemed fine, but otherwise seemed pretty random. Monday, when somebody turned up in response to a slew of complaints, I had put everything back, causing yet more confusion.
Ah, I had forgotten how handy those vending machines were. I put together, "Have you seen this child?" spoofs with assorted coworkers and then put them on all the milk cartons in the vending machine.
Did you ever stop to wonder why older or lower-end stuff is so cheap? The people buying the new stuff at much higher prices are essentially subsidizing it.
Well, what they're really subsidizing is the R&D and the factory setup. The very first copy of a new generation of processor costs billions to make; the next one costs 8 or 9 orders of magnitude less. If there aren't enough high-end purchasers to fund the development of faster chips, the old ones won't increase in price, but they won't get much cheaper, either.
Department Secretary:
Lifts tall buildings and walks under them,
kicks locomotives off the track,
catches speeding bullets in her teeth and eats them,
freezes water with a single glare,
she is God.
You might mistake this for humor. I used to work for a university, and this is dead on. From day 1, be extremely nice and helpful to the secretaries and other admin people; you'll be amazed how much easier it makes your work.
Intelligent people don't argue so much about these best practices, or at least don't fight over them zealously,
Actually, the best practices in our field change much more quickly than in others, so there is indeed a lot of room for reasonable people to differ. But even if there were, as you suggest, one set of obviously best practice, the problem is that practically nobody does them.
Say what you will about XP, but it has created a lot of buzz around testing, something that was a "best practice" in my dad's day, and even now most of the people I interview don't have any experience with. The ones I see who do unit testing regularly have all been influenced by XP.
the people behind it aren't interested in an intelligent, full and honest understanding of the best practices for computer programming
Having met some of them, I'd say you're wrong. But they did see exactly how much dust the books on best practices were gathering, and decided to do something different. Given that it keeps coming up here on Slashdot, clearly they did something right.
Our former CTO was in love with XP. [...]Velocity was one of those concepts used by our CTO to explain why he didn't have to work more than 4 hours per day.
People who like to spew bullshit will use whatever the hot topic is. That's not the fault of the hot topic.
Because it freed him from responsibility from things like designing with scalability in mind.
The way to do this in XP is to write "1000 people use the system simulateously" on a story card and then let the product manager decide when to pay for that.
When it comes up, it's just like any other story card. The product manager and the developers get together and make the acceptance tests, and then the developers do the thing until the tests pass.
If developers are scared that they don't know how to design for scalability, then they can ask the product manager to put that card in early on.
I would never use it for a new software product.
Which is, of course, your choice. But I've used it successfully for three new products. I think that's the best time to use it; getting an existing code base up to XP quality standards can be a long slog.
Why can't the Extreme Programming crowd just call it Extreme Programming (or even 'EP') and not 'XP'?
I used to hate this myself. But honestly, how many of the other agile development methods can you name? The reason that everybody heard about XP is that it has a polarizing name.
So now when I explain it to clients, I say that I consult on agile development methods. I may never even mention XP, but I usually end up introducing a lot of the practices. "XP? You're soaking in it!"
However, totally pushing that reponsability to the customer isn't correct behaviour either. There's ground in the middle that needs to be met. That, by the way, is how other professional industries work - the people you're contracting with are supposed to bring expertise to the table that you don't have (thats why you hired them, after all).
Giving the customer (aka product manager) complete power to decide what gets built does not mean that developers stop advising. It just means that the customer gets the final say.
You can, but you won't do as good a job as a professional product manager will. Most good product managers could also sit down and pound out a little code, but that doesn't mean they should.
And even if you could, you shouldn't. On an XP team, the product managers get to say what to build, but developers get to say how long it takes. This is a delicate balance of power. Allowing one person to make both business and technical decisions is akin to letting the military choose their own budget.
AFAIC, it's the developer's responsibility to figure out what the customer actually wants, by active questioning and other methods, because only the developer knows enough about software development to fully appreciate the engineering issues[...]
True! I work on an XP project, and I help them with stuff like this every day. XP says that the product manager has the power to decide, but everybody should give (and gracefully receive) advice.
and pragmatically, a doofus customer is going to be a doofus customer whether you play passive-aggressive head games with him or not.
No methodology can save you from a doofus customer. But even that case I'd take XP, as weekly iterations help doofuses and their managers see just how dumb they are. (And sometimes, they help arrogant developers see that the customer's aren't so stupid after all.)
But "passive-aggressive head games" is wide of the mark. Next time you're in San Francisco, drop me a line and you can come by and see a good XP shop in action.
1) Because it's our intrinsic human right to think about whatever we want.
FYI, thinking is something you do inside your head. Talking, on the other hand, is an action that can have consequences in the world. It's unfortunate that the urge to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's actions is not quite as intrinsic as the urge to run one's mouth.
OK, so my plan isn't perfect. Can anyone suggest anything better?
Sure. The rule should be that the loser pays the winner's legal bills, but the loser need pay no more to the winner than they paid to their own lawyers.
That way you can control the amount you want to risk, and the maximum exposure is only twice what people risk now.
There are still some slight problems with this (e.g., suits where one of the participants acts at their own lawyer) but I think they're all fixable.
Do the math. If your homebrew system goes down, you will be burning the time of 1000+ people ($60,000) per hour. With those kind of numbers it doesn't pay to do it on the cheap. Get a redundant Cisco system with plenty of power backup.
Or you could use something like this to provide redundant Linux routers on cheap commodity hardware and spend the money saved on getting more backup power.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful.
Don't knock it until you try it. The stellar Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA has pretty much gotten rid of the save command. I don't miss it. Why? Because I always want my work to be saved. The only reason I wouldn't is when using an app with poor undo support.
It's just that they are "the waking hours."
Yep! My mom always says that she loves being her own boss; she can choose to work whichever 12 hours in a day she wants.
Excellent, excellent advice. I just wanted to amplify one point:
If any one in your corporation or business insists that you don't need documentation, meeting notes, or contracts, they're either completely naive or planning to screw you over at some point.
Yes, yes, yes! Starting a business is really exciting, and everybody feels like things are going to go great. It's so easy to say, "Gosh, we can do the paperwork later." I have made this mistake myself, and always regretted it.
Take full advantage of that happy initial period to get something written down. It's sort of like having insurance: you get it precisely because you hope to never use it. At the very least, make sure it covers the basics: who puts in what (money, time, connections, etc); who has to do what; how and when people get money out; who is in charge; what happens if there is an unresolvable disagreement. Keep in mind that the partners can always decide to change the agreement later; the agreement just makes clear what people must do when they can't agree.
And good luck!
Well, learning to pay attention is actually really hard. Don't think so? Try this basic meditation exercise:
The usual way people go is to think, "One... Two... Three... Hey, I'm doing well... Wait, I just thought that I was doing well! One... Two..."
It took me a few months of practice to be able to focus for even such a short time, and I understand that's pretty typical. But practicing like this did end up helping my handwriting indirectly, as it made it easier to notice that many of my handwriting mistakes came when my attention wandered.
Slow down. That's all.
Yep! That's basically what it took for me.
It also helps to pay attention to your breathing. My handwriting is worst in stressful situations. E.g., in front of a bunch of people at a whiteboard. When I notice my writing getting bad, I focus on taking slow, relaxed breaths and making smooth, even letters. It works!