Walk away. You notified the appropriate people. After that, it no longer has anything to do with you, and can only go pear-shaped from here.
The thing is, now he's effectively published that he knows of a flaw. A trivial google search will tell which particular company this regards, and give abundant information to identify him. Although he hasn't published the particulars of his "trivial way to hack user accounts" AFAICT, he's indicated that it's - well, trivial. Malignant people are probably all over this case as we speak.
seeread: Your best course of action might be to protect yourself by formally notifying the proper authorities (CC companies?), document and secure any communications and actions you have already done, and consult a lawyer. As you've pretty much dropped the ball on this one, I would say that a lawyer is a must at this point no matter how you choose to proceed. Call one ASAP.
But the main reason I feel confident for saying so is that there are so many of those sorts of systems. With a large enough population, even rare events become common.
My prof in Comp-Sci university college told us that he'd worked on mainframes designed to be able to hot swap failing memory modules and CPUs without rebooting. That particular availability problem is of course solved by redundant boxes nowadays, but in those days that kind of redundancy were not an option for various reasons.
The Voyager craft are somewhat unique in that there are only two of them. (And they're not exactly reachable for sustaining maintenance.)
I find the engineering of the Voyager probes particularly amazing. To successfully design something for a lifespan that is more than twice the age of the technology itself at the time (first working IC was made in 1958, probes launched in 1977, expected lifetime until 2020 - and that is because power is failing) is an impressive feat of engineering. Nevermind all the nasty radiadion and EM fields it's been subjected to, close flybys of gas giants are not a walk in the park if you're a computer. From Wikipedia: [Voyager 1] gained the energy to escape the Sun's gravity completely by performing slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Saturn.
If you haven't watched the anime Planetes, you should. One of the main topics is what you're talking about. It's one of the best hard science fictions I've seen/read.
That looks interesting, personally I have the problem that I simply can't stand the usual visuals of anime/manga. It's too bad, because some of the stories seems to be very good science fiction.
Norway claims to be one yet the government covertly tortures people who say anything critical about the government, NATO and a range of other issues.
What? That is complete bullshit, I won't even ask you to back it up.
More on-topic, we do have lese-majeste laws, but they are almost never used (charges can only be brought with the explicit permission of the king). I can't remember a single case. In particular Princess Märtha Louise is a nutcase and catches a lot of public flak, with no adverse consequences for those behind it.
So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?
This is easy:
If you want to give people a system that works for every Joe Sixpack and is shiny and easy to use, but costs more: Hire lots of artists and designers, use a proven bulletproof backend, and keep a few brilliant devs on hand. Easy interoperability between your company's devices is king.
If you want to earn lots of money: Hire as many MBAs as you can get your hands on, put at least one of them in charge of each of your dev teams, and have an already established majority market share. Features before security and bugfixing is king.
If you want to provide the best system available, but the user might have to work for it: Who needs designers and artists? Upload the source code of your OS to an ftp server and let crowdsourcing do the rest. RTFM is... not "king", who gives a shit anyway, but RTFM is the only way to reach 1337-ness.
No, dogfooding is using the stuff you make yourself. It has nothing to do with WHY you made it, HOW you made it or anything else.
Its simply different than making a product to sell, and then using something entirely different internally. For instance, Microsoft selling Visual Source Safe... but not actually using it internally for Windows because it sucked so hard. That is not dogfooding.
Additionally it implies that your own product is inferior. As I understand, it is using your own inferior product, as in "dog food is not fit for human consumption, but I eat it since I made it". I don't know about you, but I'd eat regular food instead of dog food if I had a choice. See MS and the transition of Hotmail's to MS servers for reference.
Linus dogfood's Linux for instance.
Linus probably doesn't eat his own dog food, he uses Linux because he likes it more. Now, if he would rather use MacOS or whatever, but still uses Linux because he's behind it, that would be eating his own dog food. It's possible, but unlikely. I suspect I'm being trolled.
WTF is it with you kids fucking up phrases you don't understand. If you don't know what it means or where it came from will you fucking please stop god damn pretending you do. And stop calling all unpatched exploits zero day. They stopped being zero day within 24 hours of creation. After that they are just fucking exploits.
Back in the day "zero day" meant "not yet known to affected parties", or generally unknown. What the hell do you mean with "within 24 hours of creation" anyway? At least, now I know I'm being trolled. IHBT, HAND.
Thirded. It's probably not as mature as Ubuntu as I occasionally encounter bugs, but it's a lot better overall. Mint is the distro I give to friends who inquire about Linux. I've run FreeBSD and heaps of different distros on my desktop since way back when, I ran Ubuntu as long as possible, but now I've come to the point where I just want something with a consistent interface that works.
Yes, for now. I'm trying to way my options, wondering if the devil I know is better than the devil I don't know. I will not give my business to AT&T because of the whole telco immunity fiasco, and I want a GSM carrier so that does not leave me many options. Of course T-Mobile might be a part of AT&T soon anyway. This all happened Friday, my wife is due any second, after the baby is born I will have some time at home to find a new phone company.
Good luck! The reason why I asked is that I'm currently switching providers because of scummy behaviour by my current one. I bought a phone on 12 monthly payments, to my direct question "These monthly payments will end automatically after a year?" they answered yes. Well, they went away - and was replaced by a "monthly fee" for exactly the same amount, but the plan still had relatively high call charges. My online banking service happily paid the bills for me for a couple of months before I noticed. When challenged the support person agreed that it was "maybe not very intuitive" but that they could not reimburse me. I told her "Fine, I'll just switch providers", and they suddenly managed to reimburse me anyway. I'm not giving them any more business regardless, and my new plan with another provider is a better deal anyway:)
In short, punish scummy behaviour by giving your business to someone else if you're able to, and let the scummy provider know why you did so. For any Norwegians out there: stay away from Tele2, I've had very good experiences with Chess earlier and will be switching back to them:)
use libtiff, which actually handles a large fraction of the weird shit that's out there.
And still, it breaks on about 40% of the tiff files on the file server at work (I work at a publishing house). I just wanted to research how any tiff files we had which weren't compressed, but I ended up just prosessing the biggest files, because I found no tool which could get me that information. Indesign can read all of them, though.
Since I specified a plan with no data component and even asked them if I could accidentally access the Internet and incur data charges and they said no I was really surprised when per MB data was added to my plan and I was charged. I know at least 5 people that were effected in the same way, it's just really unethical as a business practice to lie to your customers.
Why on earth are you still a customer? Just curious.
Then don't sign contracts that have terms you disagree with.
Or change them prior to signing. I struck a clause from an employment contract once that was not only outrageous, but also illegal (it basically said "no overtime pay"). They tried to argue about it, but I carefully pointed out that it would not be smart of them to sign such a contract since it was, in fact, illegal. Laws regarding working conditions are very strong where I live.
Out of curiosity, have you tried singing while playing? Seems like many musicians can do that just fine, and I know the singing part of the brain is actually wired separately from the speaking part (some people who can't speak due to a brain problem can still sing or speak in poetry).
From my experience that seems like an innate ability, more or less. I'm not a very accomplished musician. I can sing along while playing (guitar) to a certain extent, but for some songs it's impossible for me due to rhythm or whatever. Nirvana - Come as You Are is one example, Lindsay Buckingham - Big Love (acoustic) is another. The latter relies heavily on muscle memory, so it's kind of strange that I can't do it. A friend of mine can sing along with whatever he can play, lead a conversation while playing, or even sing words and melody from another song (he demonstrated all three one time I brought it up). He is not a very experienced musician either.
Yet another acquaintance is a professional church organ player who has no problem playing four different melody lines with his hands and feet, but he tends to cock up the vocals if he tries to sing along when he plays the piano.
I have no idea how this works, for my own part I'm fairly good at multitasking in other respects.
This first sentence which is typed correctly and is correctly formatted...
oR thIS SeConD seNTeNcE wHiCh yOU PrObaBLy doNT reCOgNiZe thE ShaPe oF?
Also, try to read well-formed text upside-down. I read a lot, and find that individual word recognition works almost as well. What slows me down is mainly that I can no longer take in several words at a glance, but also that reading right-to-left is... unfamiliar, to say the least:)
But not immersive, I wouldn't want to be nearby that 6000 RPM rotating mirror:-)
Actually, from the stats displayed 0:26 into the video: Spin rate 15-20 Hz. I think that can be done safely, especially if you enclose it in a clear co-rotating cylinder to avoid air resistance.
There were examples of people being pretty accurate 150 years ago, i.e. From the Earth to the Moon.
Huh? I don't think Verne was particularly serious about that whole adventure, although he did get a few minor details right. Parts of it are almost as ridiculous as Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
20 000 Leagues Under the Sea, on the other hand, describes a pretty sensible design comparable to a modern submarine, although he overdoes it a bit in dramatic interest. His most amazing achievement in predicting the future I've read is Paris in the Twentieth Century, where many of his predictions are eerily accurate. So yeah, there were examples, pick the right ones:)
Sony Reader + Calibre combo is the "free" version of closed Kindle and the likes.
Agreed. Throw in the Calibre plugins to automatically strip DRM (google Apprentice Alf) and you've got the perfect setup. Ebook purchase -> Kindle4PC / ADE -> Calibre -> Sony Reader is literally a one minute operation. It's almost as easy as using the Kindle, and a lot better as you end up with a future-proof copy in your archive as well. As a voracious reader who likes to pay for his books I'm in heaven:)
This is the norm. Most places simply accept that not using those types of tools helps the bottom line, and that it is the job of managers and developers alike to keep the goals in mind and have the vision to see them through to completion, or that bug tracking is an aspect of Support.
Oh *come on*. Have you ever collaborated with competent developers and/or companies that *didn't* use source control? There is absolutely no reason not to use one, even if you're the sole dev on a small project.
A long time ago I worked with a pretty good self-taught developer on a small, but growing, community website. He didn't use a vcs, but once I told him what they did we started using one instantly. If anyone tells you that it's not necessary for whatever reason they're grossly incompetent.
I really don't see why it matters though, the ticket is tied to the license plate, hence the owner of the car, regardless of who's at the wheel.
Or, as you'd know if you read The Fine Links, the camera is obviously intended to count persons ("...and an evaluation unit connected down-line of the camera that detects and counts the passengers of the vehicle in the image recording"). So you'd wire in a looping video feed of your car full of people, since its purpose is very likely to give a discount if you don't drive alone (carpool). Go ahead and cover it up with tape, "they" will not give a shit, as you miss out on the discount. On a side note I'd probably do just that as I would've been uncomfortable with potential substantial privacy invasion in my car:)
No, I'm not. But I may be ignorant. If my statement was wrong then please correct me rather than just throwing out a blanket insult.
It's a meme/flamebait where people mix up quotes as bad as they can in order to annoy as many fangroups as possible. Examples here. It can be funny if done well, most of the time it's just stupid, but there you go. Hope this helps:)
Ribbon isn't actually that bad once you get used to it. I didn't like it in Office 2007 much, but it was improved somewhat for 2010. While my experience with it was mostly limited to assignments at university when I didn't have access to OOo, it wasn't as terrible as some have made it out to be. In some ways, it's easier.
I have to strongly disagree with you there, I hate it, but let's not do that discussion right now:)
I just wanted to say that I'd really like a search-as-you-type field like the one in the Start menu, but for the Office ribbon choices. I would have been able to find whatever I wanted in less than a second, I really don't know why the GUI gurus at Microsoft haven't made it an option. Come to think of it that'd be handy for some other applications (vlc?) as well.
Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.
Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.
In civilised parts of the world that is generally not true. Instead of going in with guns blazing we negotiate and trade.
There are lots of good suggestions in other replies, but I'd like to stress the importance of having recent offsite backups. These files are literally invaluable, as in extremely important to you, but a thief which runs off with *all* your equipment will likely delete them with no second thoughts. A friend recently lost every image and video of his firstborn after a break-in.
It's not necessary to be too fancy; I'd suggest the following: Keep your master archive on an internal drive. Buy two external drives, they are cheap. Mirror all your data to both, and place one offsite (for instance at your parents' place or in a safe at work). As you accumulate more material, store it in a specific folder on your internal drive and also the drive you have in your house, and use some online storage like Dropbox for this directory to keep recent images "backed up" offsite. Keep the external drive you have unplugged, but updated regularly. Once in a while you swap drives with your parents and update that one with your "new" directory, which you then empty. Check drive integrity on the external drives regularly, and swap them out for new ones every two-three years. I would look into creating simple rsync scripts to keep everything in sync, but with this approach it's not really neccessary.
This way you have three physical copies of your data at different locations at all times. It's a relatively low-tech solution, but short of WWIII your data should be safe. It's also relatively cheap compared to the importance of your data.
In addition you could store the whole archive with an online provider, but it doesn't really add all that much security, and you *should* have two physical copies in different locations in all cases.
This is a known way to improve query performance. Order the joins to so that you limit as much as possible the number of rows returned early on; and as simply as possible using highly selective queries where the columns involved in the join has either unique or a high percentage of unique values (>90%).
Isn't that the job of the RDBMS query planner/optimizer? It knows a lot more about the actual number of rows in each table than the developer did when he wrote the queries. I'm sure there are reasons, this is not a sarcastic question (and I'm no db expert), but I would like to know:)
Slashdot Mirror
Walk away. You notified the appropriate people. After that, it no longer has anything to do with you, and can only go pear-shaped from here.
The thing is, now he's effectively published that he knows of a flaw. A trivial google search will tell which particular company this regards, and give abundant information to identify him. Although he hasn't published the particulars of his "trivial way to hack user accounts" AFAICT, he's indicated that it's - well, trivial. Malignant people are probably all over this case as we speak.
seeread: Your best course of action might be to protect yourself by formally notifying the proper authorities (CC companies?), document and secure any communications and actions you have already done, and consult a lawyer. As you've pretty much dropped the ball on this one, I would say that a lawyer is a must at this point no matter how you choose to proceed. Call one ASAP.
Good luck!
But the main reason I feel confident for saying so is that there are so many of those sorts of systems. With a large enough population, even rare events become common.
My prof in Comp-Sci university college told us that he'd worked on mainframes designed to be able to hot swap failing memory modules and CPUs without rebooting. That particular availability problem is of course solved by redundant boxes nowadays, but in those days that kind of redundancy were not an option for various reasons.
The Voyager craft are somewhat unique in that there are only two of them . (And they're not exactly reachable for sustaining maintenance.)
I find the engineering of the Voyager probes particularly amazing. To successfully design something for a lifespan that is more than twice the age of the technology itself at the time (first working IC was made in 1958, probes launched in 1977, expected lifetime until 2020 - and that is because power is failing) is an impressive feat of engineering. Nevermind all the nasty radiadion and EM fields it's been subjected to, close flybys of gas giants are not a walk in the park if you're a computer. From Wikipedia: [Voyager 1] gained the energy to escape the Sun's gravity completely by performing slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager computer engineers don't give a shit.
If you haven't watched the anime Planetes, you should. One of the main topics is what you're talking about. It's one of the best hard science fictions I've seen/read.
That looks interesting, personally I have the problem that I simply can't stand the usual visuals of anime/manga. It's too bad, because some of the stories seems to be very good science fiction.
Norway claims to be one yet the government covertly tortures people who say anything critical about the government, NATO and a range of other issues.
What? That is complete bullshit, I won't even ask you to back it up.
More on-topic, we do have lese-majeste laws, but they are almost never used (charges can only be brought with the explicit permission of the king). I can't remember a single case. In particular Princess Märtha Louise is a nutcase and catches a lot of public flak, with no adverse consequences for those behind it.
So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?
This is easy:
If you want to give people a system that works for every Joe Sixpack and is shiny and easy to use, but costs more: Hire lots of artists and designers, use a proven bulletproof backend, and keep a few brilliant devs on hand. Easy interoperability between your company's devices is king.
If you want to earn lots of money: Hire as many MBAs as you can get your hands on, put at least one of them in charge of each of your dev teams, and have an already established majority market share. Features before security and bugfixing is king.
If you want to provide the best system available, but the user might have to work for it: Who needs designers and artists? Upload the source code of your OS to an ftp server and let crowdsourcing do the rest. RTFM is... not "king", who gives a shit anyway, but RTFM is the only way to reach 1337-ness.
No, dogfooding is using the stuff you make yourself. It has nothing to do with WHY you made it, HOW you made it or anything else.
Its simply different than making a product to sell, and then using something entirely different internally. For instance, Microsoft selling Visual Source Safe ... but not actually using it internally for Windows because it sucked so hard. That is not dogfooding.
Additionally it implies that your own product is inferior. As I understand, it is using your own inferior product, as in "dog food is not fit for human consumption, but I eat it since I made it". I don't know about you, but I'd eat regular food instead of dog food if I had a choice. See MS and the transition of Hotmail's to MS servers for reference.
Linus dogfood's Linux for instance.
Linus probably doesn't eat his own dog food, he uses Linux because he likes it more. Now, if he would rather use MacOS or whatever, but still uses Linux because he's behind it, that would be eating his own dog food. It's possible, but unlikely. I suspect I'm being trolled.
WTF is it with you kids fucking up phrases you don't understand. If you don't know what it means or where it came from will you fucking please stop god damn pretending you do. And stop calling all unpatched exploits zero day. They stopped being zero day within 24 hours of creation. After that they are just fucking exploits.
Back in the day "zero day" meant "not yet known to affected parties", or generally unknown. What the hell do you mean with "within 24 hours of creation" anyway? At least, now I know I'm being trolled. IHBT, HAND.
I too dropped Ubuntu for Mint. Much happier now.
Thirded. It's probably not as mature as Ubuntu as I occasionally encounter bugs, but it's a lot better overall. Mint is the distro I give to friends who inquire about Linux. I've run FreeBSD and heaps of different distros on my desktop since way back when, I ran Ubuntu as long as possible, but now I've come to the point where I just want something with a consistent interface that works.
Yes, for now. I'm trying to way my options, wondering if the devil I know is better than the devil I don't know. I will not give my business to AT&T because of the whole telco immunity fiasco, and I want a GSM carrier so that does not leave me many options. Of course T-Mobile might be a part of AT&T soon anyway. This all happened Friday, my wife is due any second, after the baby is born I will have some time at home to find a new phone company.
Good luck! The reason why I asked is that I'm currently switching providers because of scummy behaviour by my current one. I bought a phone on 12 monthly payments, to my direct question "These monthly payments will end automatically after a year?" they answered yes. Well, they went away - and was replaced by a "monthly fee" for exactly the same amount, but the plan still had relatively high call charges. My online banking service happily paid the bills for me for a couple of months before I noticed. When challenged the support person agreed that it was "maybe not very intuitive" but that they could not reimburse me. I told her "Fine, I'll just switch providers", and they suddenly managed to reimburse me anyway. I'm not giving them any more business regardless, and my new plan with another provider is a better deal anyway :)
In short, punish scummy behaviour by giving your business to someone else if you're able to, and let the scummy provider know why you did so. For any Norwegians out there: stay away from Tele2, I've had very good experiences with Chess earlier and will be switching back to them :)
use libtiff, which actually handles a large fraction of the weird shit that's out there.
And still, it breaks on about 40% of the tiff files on the file server at work (I work at a publishing house). I just wanted to research how any tiff files we had which weren't compressed, but I ended up just prosessing the biggest files, because I found no tool which could get me that information. Indesign can read all of them, though.
Since I specified a plan with no data component and even asked them if I could accidentally access the Internet and incur data charges and they said no I was really surprised when per MB data was added to my plan and I was charged. I know at least 5 people that were effected in the same way, it's just really unethical as a business practice to lie to your customers.
Why on earth are you still a customer? Just curious.
Then don't sign contracts that have terms you disagree with.
Or change them prior to signing. I struck a clause from an employment contract once that was not only outrageous, but also illegal (it basically said "no overtime pay"). They tried to argue about it, but I carefully pointed out that it would not be smart of them to sign such a contract since it was, in fact, illegal. Laws regarding working conditions are very strong where I live.
Out of curiosity, have you tried singing while playing? Seems like many musicians can do that just fine, and I know the singing part of the brain is actually wired separately from the speaking part (some people who can't speak due to a brain problem can still sing or speak in poetry).
From my experience that seems like an innate ability, more or less. I'm not a very accomplished musician. I can sing along while playing (guitar) to a certain extent, but for some songs it's impossible for me due to rhythm or whatever. Nirvana - Come as You Are is one example, Lindsay Buckingham - Big Love (acoustic) is another. The latter relies heavily on muscle memory, so it's kind of strange that I can't do it. A friend of mine can sing along with whatever he can play, lead a conversation while playing, or even sing words and melody from another song (he demonstrated all three one time I brought it up). He is not a very experienced musician either.
Yet another acquaintance is a professional church organ player who has no problem playing four different melody lines with his hands and feet, but he tends to cock up the vocals if he tries to sing along when he plays the piano.
I have no idea how this works, for my own part I'm fairly good at multitasking in other respects.
Easy Proof
Which is harder to read:
This first sentence which is typed correctly and is correctly formatted...
oR thIS SeConD seNTeNcE wHiCh yOU PrObaBLy doNT reCOgNiZe thE ShaPe oF?
Also, try to read well-formed text upside-down. I read a lot, and find that individual word recognition works almost as well. What slows me down is mainly that I can no longer take in several words at a glance, but also that reading right-to-left is... unfamiliar, to say the least :)
The brain/vision system is fascinating indeed.
But not immersive, I wouldn't want to be nearby that 6000 RPM rotating mirror :-)
Actually, from the stats displayed 0:26 into the video: Spin rate 15-20 Hz. I think that can be done safely, especially if you enclose it in a clear co-rotating cylinder to avoid air resistance.
What is this, argument from fiction? Can someone translate that into snobby latin?
Here you go: Argumentum theologicum :)
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if this "latin" even resembles the real thing)
There were examples of people being pretty accurate 150 years ago, i.e. From the Earth to the Moon.
Huh? I don't think Verne was particularly serious about that whole adventure, although he did get a few minor details right. Parts of it are almost as ridiculous as Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
20 000 Leagues Under the Sea, on the other hand, describes a pretty sensible design comparable to a modern submarine, although he overdoes it a bit in dramatic interest. His most amazing achievement in predicting the future I've read is Paris in the Twentieth Century, where many of his predictions are eerily accurate. So yeah, there were examples, pick the right ones :)
Sony Reader + Calibre combo is the "free" version of closed Kindle and the likes.
Agreed. Throw in the Calibre plugins to automatically strip DRM (google Apprentice Alf) and you've got the perfect setup. Ebook purchase -> Kindle4PC / ADE -> Calibre -> Sony Reader is literally a one minute operation. It's almost as easy as using the Kindle, and a lot better as you end up with a future-proof copy in your archive as well. As a voracious reader who likes to pay for his books I'm in heaven :)
This is the norm.
Most places simply accept that not using those types of tools helps the bottom line, and that it is the job of managers and developers alike to keep the goals in mind and have the vision to see them through to completion, or that bug tracking is an aspect of Support.
Oh *come on*. Have you ever collaborated with competent developers and/or companies that *didn't* use source control? There is absolutely no reason not to use one, even if you're the sole dev on a small project.
A long time ago I worked with a pretty good self-taught developer on a small, but growing, community website. He didn't use a vcs, but once I told him what they did we started using one instantly. If anyone tells you that it's not necessary for whatever reason they're grossly incompetent.
I really don't see why it matters though, the ticket is tied to the license plate, hence the owner of the car, regardless of who's at the wheel.
Or, as you'd know if you read The Fine Links, the camera is obviously intended to count persons ("...and an evaluation unit connected down-line of the camera that detects and counts the passengers of the vehicle in the image recording"). So you'd wire in a looping video feed of your car full of people, since its purpose is very likely to give a discount if you don't drive alone (carpool). Go ahead and cover it up with tape, "they" will not give a shit, as you miss out on the discount. On a side note I'd probably do just that as I would've been uncomfortable with potential substantial privacy invasion in my car :)
No, I'm not. But I may be ignorant. If my statement was wrong then please correct me rather than just throwing out a blanket insult.
It's a meme/flamebait where people mix up quotes as bad as they can in order to annoy as many fangroups as possible. Examples here. It can be funny if done well, most of the time it's just stupid, but there you go. Hope this helps :)
Ribbon isn't actually that bad once you get used to it. I didn't like it in Office 2007 much, but it was improved somewhat for 2010. While my experience with it was mostly limited to assignments at university when I didn't have access to OOo, it wasn't as terrible as some have made it out to be. In some ways, it's easier.
I have to strongly disagree with you there, I hate it, but let's not do that discussion right now :)
I just wanted to say that I'd really like a search-as-you-type field like the one in the Start menu, but for the Office ribbon choices. I would have been able to find whatever I wanted in less than a second, I really don't know why the GUI gurus at Microsoft haven't made it an option. Come to think of it that'd be handy for some other applications (vlc?) as well.
Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.
Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.
In civilised parts of the world that is generally not true. Instead of going in with guns blazing we negotiate and trade.
There are lots of good suggestions in other replies, but I'd like to stress the importance of having recent offsite backups. These files are literally invaluable, as in extremely important to you, but a thief which runs off with *all* your equipment will likely delete them with no second thoughts. A friend recently lost every image and video of his firstborn after a break-in.
It's not necessary to be too fancy; I'd suggest the following: Keep your master archive on an internal drive. Buy two external drives, they are cheap. Mirror all your data to both, and place one offsite (for instance at your parents' place or in a safe at work). As you accumulate more material, store it in a specific folder on your internal drive and also the drive you have in your house, and use some online storage like Dropbox for this directory to keep recent images "backed up" offsite. Keep the external drive you have unplugged, but updated regularly. Once in a while you swap drives with your parents and update that one with your "new" directory, which you then empty. Check drive integrity on the external drives regularly, and swap them out for new ones every two-three years. I would look into creating simple rsync scripts to keep everything in sync, but with this approach it's not really neccessary.
This way you have three physical copies of your data at different locations at all times. It's a relatively low-tech solution, but short of WWIII your data should be safe. It's also relatively cheap compared to the importance of your data.
In addition you could store the whole archive with an online provider, but it doesn't really add all that much security, and you *should* have two physical copies in different locations in all cases.
Good luck!
So you discovered indexing...
the road to being the king of the hill DBA is almost over!
Well, the whole point was that I basically have no clue... which is still mostly true. And yeah, indices to avoid full table scans are neat :)
It's kind of fun to tinker like that, though, especially when I get it working. Of course it's bad that I should have to do so in production.
This is a known way to improve query performance. Order the joins to so that you limit as much as possible the number of rows returned early on; and as simply as possible using highly selective queries where the columns involved in the join has either unique or a high percentage of unique values (>90%).
Isn't that the job of the RDBMS query planner/optimizer? It knows a lot more about the actual number of rows in each table than the developer did when he wrote the queries. I'm sure there are reasons, this is not a sarcastic question (and I'm no db expert), but I would like to know :)