This doesn't make much sense for retail, as the CCV isn't used or recorded; the user enters a PIN at the point of sale. But, the CCV could be recorded and fraudulently reused by any online retailer or man-in-the-middle. Randomly changing CCV's would limit the damage.
I think that Asimov's observations on the inhibitory effect of visibility and accountability are applicable to the smaller forms of creativity and risk taking like trying new tools and technologies.
I've seen this occur with SCRUM. We had dev team build a new product, burning down backlog through multiple sprints, with an overall results that were pedestrian. By which I mean functional, pretty interface; nothing to complain about really, code was reviewed, tests passed, etc. But you were left wondering there is a better fundamental approach to the problem.
Then they got a bit of down time and someone on the team prototyped a new architecture that would have halved the development effort. This exploration could have been done at the beginning and had been thought of by the person concerned, but the talented - and introverted - individual didn't advocate for it in the face of daily stand-up and burn-down visibility.
We just had a major shit-storm in Canada over a government bill (C-30) that would allow the police the right to identifying information without a warrant. The bill has been hustled off to committee for amendment as a result of public outrage. Government politician must be rolling their eyes at the timing of CIMA's demands.
This is part of an emerging pattern in which consumers are sold restricted systems with enforced toll collection. Cory Doctorow refers to this as "the coming war on general-purpose computing". His analysis is thought provoking. It is disheartening to consider how may technologies with security benefits can also be used to restrict the rights of customers.
Traffic management is necessary because bandwidth is less than infinite. Extreme consumers will impair service to others if there is no mechanism to prevent this. My company recently implemented bandwidth guarantees for VOIP traffic on the fiber between our buildings because file transfers were causing drop outs on phone calls. In other words our routers throttle file transfers to provide decent QOS for voice. I like the CRTC's approach because it provides transparency of ISPs QOS policies and creates an environment for competitive incentive to avoid abusive restrictions, with some fallback for adult supervision.
I'm a moderately heavy bittorent (Vuze) user. My ISP is Rogers Cable, whose internet service is available in a number of speeds/caps/pricing from $25 to $150 per month. Rogers has been reasonably open about its traffic management practices and is on record as throttling bittorrent on the upstream (from the house) because this is a scarce resource. Problems for me - nil; obscure torrents with few peers/seeds run slowly, popular torrents download like sh** through a goose; surfing and Skype work smoothly even in peak periods. I left Bell Sympatico when my experience was the opposite.
Hopefully the new administration won't have the hubris to confuse "morally justified" with "good idea" as frequently as the previous.
I've formed the impression that President-elect Obama is willing to reason about hard problems with others before locking in the policy. This is an important stylistic difference from GB, who developed an international reputation for pushing predetermined outcomes.
Copybot reminds me of Damon Knight'c classic SF novel A is for Anything". in which a device called Gismo is mailed around the world. To quote from the opening chapter "THIS IS A GISMO IT IS A DUPLICATING DEVICE-- IT WILL DUPLICATE ANYTHING-- EVEN ANOTHER GISMO. TO OPERATE, SIMPLY ATTACH A SAMPLE OF WHATEVER YOU WISH TO COPY TO THE LEFT HAND ARM OF THE GISMO, AS SHOWN." Economic and social chaos ensues, innovation grinds to a halt, civilization collapses... By the middle of the book only people have any real value, even these can be duplicated but they have opinions about what can be done to them; it is a great read.
This sounds like the work of Yevgeny Podkletnov He claimed to have countered the effects of gravity in an experiment at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland in 1992 using a spinning super conducting ceramic ring.
Devin's blog also has an excellent posting on Apache performance. "Tuning Apache, part 1" (and the comments) is the sort of succinct empirical advice it is always nice to find.
You might want to take a look at bitHeads (bitheads.com), an excellent firm here in Ottawa, they were founded to do what you are looking for. I've worked with some of their people in the past. They've done a lot of work for startups and I've heard that they sometimes take (partial) payment in equity. Best wishes...
Yikes, I have 18 of 20 on my shelves!
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 1
There are many who could be this list, but I don't get Robert Anton Wilson over Bruce Sterling.
These comparisons to cellular data networks are a bit off the mark. Inmarsat's BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) of which the I4 satellites are the space segment, only supports fixed applications. You need a directional antenna that is pointed at, and has clear line of site to, the satellite.
The closest satellite equivalents to cell networks for voice are the Irridium and Thoria services. Irridium is heavily used for mobile data applications, but doesn't offer GPRS-like speeds or IP connectivity.
Itanium is (or used to be) very power hungry. When Itanium released, someone from Google remarked that they had no interest in Itanium because electricity was a very large operational cost.
A little bit of H2S and the metabolic rate crashes, body temp falls close to ambient, with no apparent cognitive downside after six hours? I'm amazed that a single simple molecule (even a smelly one:-) ), could have such an effect.
I'm left wondering about the genetic background of these mice. Perhaps they have a hibernating recent ancestor? There will be a rush to replicate the result on other animals.
Safe human hibernation could open up the solar system.
There haven't been any serious American proposals to go the moon in quite some time. I've never quite understood why the US manned space program has had so much focus on Mars as the next destination rather than the Moon.
The proposed Mars missions entail trip-times and ground stays of pretty long duration. The Mars-firsters advocate "living off the land" including cracking local water for fuel to return in order to make the trip affordable.
It is only 3 days to the moon, and if you spent the same time there as contemplated for a Mars mission, you'd pretty much consider it a 'moon colony'. T'would be a good place to debug all those technologies talked about for Mars; and much cheaper.
This is a really useful pointer to a very simple optimization. We've recently replaced our SonicWall firewalls with OpenBSD, so using ALTQ will be really straightforward. I wonder how easy it is to accomplish on Linux.
Once upon a time, a very competent software architect I worked with warned me about this evil thing called PERL - a scripting language that was inherently unstructured and unmaintainable, and that tempted the impressionable from the path of good coding with the temptation of instant results.
This input influenced my attitude and aligned nicely with personal exposure to shell scripting back when I actually coded in a meaningful way. I think that much of the negativity at senior levels in some companies relates to memories of the days when a few fools tried to do way too much in the shell.
In reality, dynamic languages like PERL and Python aren't really 'scripting languages' in the sense that the C shell was/is. But they are hard to comprehend if your mindset is "compiled" versus "script". There is a weird beauty to what "my" does that is hard to grok if you come at it from a statically compiled perspective. So it may take some explaining to persuade the skeptical.
At the end of the day, if senior management hears that you have a better approach that isn't going to bite in the long run it will probably be sanctioned.
Could someone point me to the clauses in which I've supposedly granted permission for this abuse? Maybe the words are in there; my eyes keep glazing over...
I was a Plato fiend when I was in high school in Halifax. Dalhousie U had a terminal in the library connected to U of Quebec. It was an amazing environment for the day. The terminal combined vector graphics with character mapping (s/w reprogramming of character bitmaps) to do things like animate liquid pouring into a beaker.
The educational programs were excellent. The game (simulation?) rvr is talking about was called Emergency. It was a simulation of a small town emergency room written for students of a US med school.
However it was the multiplayer games that really got me hooked. There was Airfight which used realistic flight models. You could fly an F-16 against other students on the network. The simulation ran in real-time and you had to hammer the refresh key on your terminal to have an even vaguely up to date picture of everyone's position. My handle was "Ace McCool" for anyone else with memories.
Empire was a Federation versus Klingon battle to conquer the universe that pitted teams of players against each other over a period of days. The sense of community was amazing for the day.
Plato required the dedicated resources of a high end Control Data (CDC) Cyber mainframe to run. Moores law eventually enabled CDC release release a single user version on an expensive PC, but by that time the content had come to look pretty dated. Eventually CDC killed the product completely.
I had a guy apply to me for a job who had worked for CDC exclusively on Plato courseware for his whole career, fourteen years as I recall, and found himself on the street.
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This doesn't make much sense for retail, as the CCV isn't used or recorded; the user enters a PIN at the point of sale. But, the CCV could be recorded and fraudulently reused by any online retailer or man-in-the-middle. Randomly changing CCV's would limit the damage.
Thanks for the comments. All fair points, particularly your remarks about 20-20 hindsight/grass is greener.
I think that Asimov's observations on the inhibitory effect of visibility and accountability are applicable to the smaller forms of creativity and risk taking like trying new tools and technologies.
I've seen this occur with SCRUM. We had dev team build a new product, burning down backlog through multiple sprints, with an overall results that were pedestrian. By which I mean functional, pretty interface; nothing to complain about really, code was reviewed, tests passed, etc. But you were left wondering there is a better fundamental approach to the problem.
Then they got a bit of down time and someone on the team prototyped a new architecture that would have halved the development effort. This exploration could have been done at the beginning and had been thought of by the person concerned, but the talented - and introverted - individual didn't advocate for it in the face of daily stand-up and burn-down visibility.
When I submitted this article, the preview wasn't reliably displaying changes to text in the edit box; "needs struggles" got by me.
Thanks for that 19th. I quite enjoyed reading it. :)
We just had a major shit-storm in Canada over a government bill (C-30) that would allow the police the right to identifying information without a warrant. The bill has been hustled off to committee for amendment as a result of public outrage. Government politician must be rolling their eyes at the timing of CIMA's demands.
This is part of an emerging pattern in which consumers are sold restricted systems with enforced toll collection. Cory Doctorow refers to this as "the coming war on general-purpose computing". His analysis is thought provoking. It is disheartening to consider how may technologies with security benefits can also be used to restrict the rights of customers.
Traffic management is necessary because bandwidth is less than infinite. Extreme consumers will impair service to others if there is no mechanism to prevent this. My company recently implemented bandwidth guarantees for VOIP traffic on the fiber between our buildings because file transfers were causing drop outs on phone calls. In other words our routers throttle file transfers to provide decent QOS for voice. I like the CRTC's approach because it provides transparency of ISPs QOS policies and creates an environment for competitive incentive to avoid abusive restrictions, with some fallback for adult supervision.
I'm a moderately heavy bittorent (Vuze) user. My ISP is Rogers Cable, whose internet service is available in a number of speeds/caps/pricing from $25 to $150 per month. Rogers has been reasonably open about its traffic management practices and is on record as throttling bittorrent on the upstream (from the house) because this is a scarce resource. Problems for me - nil; obscure torrents with few peers/seeds run slowly, popular torrents download like sh** through a goose; surfing and Skype work smoothly even in peak periods. I left Bell Sympatico when my experience was the opposite.
Hopefully the new administration won't have the hubris to confuse "morally justified" with "good idea" as frequently as the previous.
I've formed the impression that President-elect Obama is willing to reason about hard problems with others before locking in the policy. This is an important stylistic difference from GB, who developed an international reputation for pushing predetermined outcomes.
Copybot reminds me of Damon Knight'c classic SF novel A is for Anything". in which a device called Gismo is mailed around the world. To quote from the opening chapter "THIS IS A GISMO IT IS A DUPLICATING DEVICE-- IT WILL DUPLICATE ANYTHING-- EVEN ANOTHER GISMO. TO OPERATE, SIMPLY ATTACH A SAMPLE OF WHATEVER YOU WISH TO COPY TO THE LEFT HAND ARM OF THE GISMO, AS SHOWN."
Economic and social chaos ensues, innovation grinds to a halt, civilization collapses... By the middle of the book only people have any real value, even these can be duplicated but they have opinions about what can be done to them; it is a great read.
This sounds like the work of Yevgeny Podkletnov He claimed to have countered the effects of gravity in an experiment at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland in 1992 using a spinning super conducting ceramic ring.
Devin's blog also has an excellent posting on Apache performance. "Tuning Apache, part 1" (and the comments) is the sort of succinct empirical advice it is always nice to find.
You might want to take a look at bitHeads (bitheads.com), an excellent firm here in Ottawa, they were founded to do what you are looking for. I've worked with some of their people in the past. They've done a lot of work for startups and I've heard that they sometimes take (partial) payment in equity.
Best wishes...
There are many who could be this list, but I don't get Robert Anton Wilson over Bruce Sterling.
These comparisons to cellular data networks are a bit off the mark. Inmarsat's BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) of which the I4 satellites are the space segment, only supports fixed applications. You need a directional antenna that is pointed at, and has clear line of site to, the satellite.
The closest satellite equivalents to cell networks for voice are the Irridium and Thoria services. Irridium is heavily used for mobile data applications, but doesn't offer GPRS-like speeds or IP connectivity.
Sadly, Google doesn't seem to translate Russian to English.
I just took a read of AMD's brief. Makes me wonder if the IBM/Apple relationship was the object of similar monopolistic tactics.
Itanium is (or used to be) very power hungry. When Itanium released, someone from Google remarked that they had no interest in Itanium because electricity was a very large operational cost.
A little bit of H2S and the metabolic rate crashes, body temp falls close to ambient, with no apparent cognitive downside after six hours? :-) ), could have such an effect.
I'm amazed that a single simple molecule (even a smelly one
I'm left wondering about the genetic background of these mice. Perhaps they have a hibernating recent ancestor? There will be a rush to replicate the result on other animals.
Safe human hibernation could open up the solar system.
There is a Wired article on the Talon here.
There haven't been any serious American proposals to go the moon in quite some time. I've never quite understood why the US manned space program has had so much focus on Mars as the next destination rather than the Moon.
The proposed Mars missions entail trip-times and ground stays of pretty long duration. The Mars-firsters advocate "living off the land" including cracking local water for fuel to return in order to make the trip affordable.
It is only 3 days to the moon, and if you spent the same time there as contemplated for a Mars mission, you'd pretty much consider it a 'moon colony'. T'would be a good place to debug all those technologies talked about for Mars; and much cheaper.
This is a really useful pointer to a very simple optimization. We've recently replaced our SonicWall firewalls with OpenBSD, so using ALTQ will be really straightforward. I wonder how easy it is to accomplish on Linux.
Once upon a time, a very competent software architect I worked with warned me about this evil thing called PERL - a scripting language that was inherently unstructured and unmaintainable, and that tempted the impressionable from the path of good coding with the temptation of instant results.
This input influenced my attitude and aligned nicely with personal exposure to shell scripting back when I actually coded in a meaningful way. I think that much of the negativity at senior levels in some companies relates to memories of the days when a few fools tried to do way too much in the shell.
In reality, dynamic languages like PERL and Python aren't really 'scripting languages' in the sense that the C shell was/is. But they are hard to comprehend if your mindset is "compiled" versus "script". There is a weird beauty to what "my" does that is hard to grok if you come at it from a statically compiled perspective. So it may take some explaining to persuade the skeptical.
At the end of the day, if senior management hears that you have a better approach that isn't going to bite in the long run it will probably be sanctioned.
Could someone point me to the clauses in which I've supposedly granted permission for this abuse?
Maybe the words are in there; my eyes keep glazing over...
I was a Plato fiend when I was in high school in Halifax. Dalhousie U had a terminal in the library connected to U of Quebec. It was an amazing environment for the day. The terminal combined vector graphics with character mapping (s/w reprogramming of character bitmaps) to do things like animate liquid pouring into a beaker.
The educational programs were excellent. The game (simulation?) rvr is talking about was called Emergency. It was a simulation of a small town emergency room written for students of a US med school.
However it was the multiplayer games that really got me hooked. There was Airfight which used realistic flight models. You could fly an F-16 against other students on the network. The simulation ran in real-time and you had to hammer the refresh key on your terminal to have an even vaguely up to date picture of everyone's position. My handle was "Ace McCool" for anyone else with memories.
Empire was a Federation versus Klingon battle to conquer the universe that pitted teams of players against each other over a period of days. The sense of community was amazing for the day.
Plato required the dedicated resources of a high end Control Data (CDC) Cyber mainframe to run. Moores law eventually enabled CDC release release a single user version on an expensive PC, but by that time the content had come to look pretty dated. Eventually CDC killed the product completely.
I had a guy apply to me for a job who had worked for CDC exclusively on Plato courseware for his whole career, fourteen years as I recall, and found himself on the street.