English is so rich a language, in fact, that we naturally learn it as a meta-language instead of directly as a language. This is how we are able to decode the meaning of slang phrases that we've never heard before...these phrases strike a chord with us because they evoke imagery that is indirectly or obliquely referred to by phrasology with which we're already intimate. Even when expressing ourselves to audiences of unsurpassed erudition, we ought always sedulously eschew unmitigated hyperverbosity, obfuscatory redundancy, and munificent prolixity.
Sure, you may have understood the last half of that increasingly dense paragraph, but it took a lot of work on your part didn't it? So what are we after: communication or correct but unnatural verbiage? You must remember that language evolves...though I will concede that it does not evolve as well if we do not participate in it.
I go for a middle-of-the-road approach. I expect that people should know the common, everyday words because these words lend themselves to actually enhancing your clarity of thought. It's true--you actually become smarter in immeasurable ways by knowing the difference between "their" and "there", "loose" and "lose", "your" and "you're". People who misuse these kinds of words send a valuable message to their readers: I'm an idiot, I can't handle the simplest aspects of my native tongue (foreigners are forgiven their trespasses in this regard), don't pay attention to what I say but instead feel sad for me. I'm more forgiving with things like "octopuses" vs "octopi" (both are valid), "viruses" and "virii" (only the former--not all words ending in "-us" are created equal), mainly because these people are cute and they amuse me in their quest to impress us with their creative applications of Latin etymology.
Less amusing to me is when dictionaries disagree. It turns out that Merriam-Webster has decided that "noo-kyuh-ler" is valid...though they note that it is a pronunciation (pronOunciation? ha! homework for you) "disapproved of by many", it still made it in as a secondary (and yes, this was M-W's policy at least as far back as 1997, long before Bush Jr.). Dictionary.com notes the usage without elevating it to the status of the proper. Many people don't realize this, but these linguistic decisions are taken by an annual meeting of professors and language experts at Oxford University. Occasionally the results of these meetings can be very surprising--the last one of these meetings was about six weeks ago, and they removed a word (due to underuse) which I had always considered untouchable: "gullible". So give the on-line dictionaries a chance to catch up, but searches for this word will go unresolved in few months' time.
Part of what makes this discussion so difficult is that these two OSes are undoubtedly aimed at (or at least enjoyed by) different target audiences. Linux/UNIX users can justifiably argue that these OSes come "out of the box" poorly configured for security, but that's fine. Windows users can hardly make the same argument given the type of user that OS is aimed at (this is not a slam, it's just a simple statement of fact that my Grammy-maw isn't going to use Linux anytime soon).
What if iMacs were delivered with poor security? Is this more or less of a problem than delivering a corporate UNIX server that has a staff of administrators to configure it?
The problem for would-be virus-writers on the Linux platform is that there is more ego-weight on the side of fixing and protecting Linux than on the side of embarrassing that platform and bringing it down. Besides, Linux users are by definition more intimately knowledgable about their computers and more likely to keep up with news, patches, updates, etc.
Viruses are an ego-based affair. There is more interest in protecting Linux than harming it, so any virus that comes out would probably find that the security hole closed long before it achieved penetration worth bragging rights.
Of all the socially challenged hackers out there, there are at least a few that hate Linux and would like to bring it down. It hasn't happened though for more reasons than Microsofties would like to admit.
I disagree with you wholeheartedly. While I have better things to do than write viruses, I think the people that do it contribute to software in an unignorable, public way. They exercise complex systems in ways that companies themselves would otherwise refuse. As we become more and more advanced as a society, our software systems take control over more and more elements of our daily lives.
The catchword for this discussion is: robustness. We absolutely need our systems to be robust if we're going to depend on them. Let's say for a time we were somehow able to figure out a way to get people to stop writing viruses and probing security in general. Companies would undoubtedly get lazy, and the whole thing would get saved up for one big cataclysmic event per major software system once some foreign company/government/organized crime/terrorist group had something big to gain.
Think about banking software...a foreign group figures out how to exploit bank software, and because we're so naive we've never written any code that prevents it into our banking software. Think about the economy...a terrorist organization could strike us from wherever they are simply by probing for years and years, and then unleashing hell on earth with major coordinated attacks. Think about governments--these are less for the big-style public attacks, but they could tease out information about their own citizens or those of other countries and have information they shouldn't.
The fact is, we shouldn't be scared of the guy hacking in his basement...we should welcome his attacks and take responsibility for thwarting them, because if a guy with an 486 running Linux in his basement can hack a corporate server that contains sensitive data, or infect everyone's desktop machines at home with some viral code, what could a big company or country do with millions of dollars in resources? Your approach needlessly puts us at the whim of those who are able and have better reasons for hacking into our personal affairs.
Also, consider the fact that advances in one area (security) often contribute to advances in other areas--someday we may advanced methods of brute force security when we move to an AI model...not to protect systems from people necessarily, but from the probes and attacks of an evolving and not always controllable computer system. This is a contrived point, but we need to make sure we've evolved in all areas to the point of being able to control our future when any one area gets advanced enough.
I think you missed the point, sir. The point I was trying to make is that I was enthusiastically willing to engage the company's policy and did so. But, because the policy was suboptimal (not for me, mind you...for the company) it ended up costing the company far more than if they'd just done the smart thing. The touchstone for all of that was my legal right to deduct my business expenses, and the necessity to completely separate business from personal expenses due to the complicated tax code. This is not what I would have preferred, but like I said, I'm a company man and I'll do what's good for the company and my country!
You know, it hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but what if everyone happened to have the same difficulties in pursuing their absolute, irrefutable rights to separate the business expenses imposed upon them by their companies from their personal lives? I'm just thinking out loud here, but if this same thing happened to everyone, gosh golly, I think companies would end up spending a lot of money and not getting much of the extra work their employees are all too willing to pitch in. Even though their employees are willing to sacrifice for the good of the company, the policy would suck up all the projected savings from such a policy and then some.
I had this happen at a previous company. But I was smart about it--I planned on writing off every dime I paid for work-related expenses. This turns out to be very difficult to do if you use your personal items part of the time for business and part of the time for personal use. So the only logical conclusion: get separate items you can use 100% for business, and that way you can write those off 100% without fear of getting audited by the IRS. When I explained this to my manager, she balked but I asked if they would allow me to expense professional tax services (around $400/year) and she said no. The upshot is, when they tell you to pay for these things out of your own pocket, you can choose to do it any way you want to...after all, it's your money, right?:)
I had good cell service and an awesome broadband connection already...so I couldn't justify spending a lot on a second cell and Internet connection, which was necessary for the aforementioned tax purposes. I found a cell provider that had a pay-as-you-go plan...use no minutes that month, and pay no money other than a $1.95 monthly service charge to keep the account open...and I got a free cell phone to boot for signing up (there was like a $50 activation fee, but I was allowed to expense this based on the argument that I already had a cell, I was only doing this for tax purposes and the good of the company, so I didn't want to pay a second activation fee). By deferring to choose a plan that included any minutes, I effectively had a zero minute plan that shuttled all callers directly to voicemail (I would explain that I couldn't afford a lot of minutes, and I couldn't afford a plan for the business phone that included a lot of minutes...and oh yea, I signed a three year contract so no changies! Unless the company wants to let me expense the $150 early termination fee). The good thing is my voicemail could be picked up on the web or forwarded to my email in the form of a wav file, so I didn't need to spend minutes checking it.
This didn't work out so well, so ultimately my manager agreed to deal with my situation as a special case and allow me to expense an inexpensive fixed minute plan. But wouldn't ya know it...just as soon as one thing is addressed, another takes its place! It turns out that the free cell phone I got with the plan had a set of expensive, proprietary batteries that easily set a memory. Little did I know! But within a few weeks of having the phone, the one set of batteries it came with would only go about 5 minutes on a full charge. I was allowed to expense another set for around $80, but those quickly set the same memory at around 5 minutes of talk time. I just couldn't remember to fully cycle those things before charging them for the life of me!
I found a 9600bps modem in my dad's basement and was able to find a service provider that offered very cheap 24kbps connections...the downside of course is that it would drop the connection every few minutes, but what do you expect for $3.95/month? Fortunately, the ISP also provided an email inbox/forwarding service so I could keep the separation between my personal and business life very clean and clear for the IRS. Unfortunately, that forwarding service never seemed to work! And that was unfortunate because that's where all those voicemails from my cell service were getting forwarded to. Oh well!
I felt that since the business cell and the dialup account were purely for business it was completely justified for me to make all research, purchase, setup, and customer support calls from the office during the normal workday. I quickly learned that even the simplest of issues can be quite time-consuming to deal with over the phone. If things got too busy at work, some showstopping problem on my cell plan or dial-up account might not get dealt with for weeks! Finally, I had to schedule several-hour long appointments with myself in Microsoft Outlook to make these support calls and get these problems sorted out. And I did generate a lot of suppo
At what pixel density do you fail to notice a difference in image quality, anyway?
Ah, a subject that to answer properly requires a foray into many frontiers: physical, biological, psychological, mathematical...a true opportunity for/.ing geek-speaking fun.
You're right, though, at some point the human eye can no longer discern a "real" difference between two screen resolutions, though it's apparently higher than we thought before digital cameras came along. Now that the professional photographers have come along with their interpretation of digital images versus 35mm film, I've read that digital images have to be much better, resolution-wise, than 35mm film to equate to the same level of image quality.
What's that, you say, that doesn't make sense! Well, as it happens, 35mm film is coated with photosensitive crystals that, when exposed to light, chemically react with the film substrate and expose it. These crystals are randomly oriented and have no discernable pattern. Images falling on the backplane of a digital camera, on the other hand, are captured onto a predefined grid pattern, usually a repeating rectangular grid, sometimes a hexagonal one, but nevertheless a repeating grid.
The human eye is very adept at picking up repeating regular patterns, even very tiny ones. The individual dots themselves may be too small to see, but lines in the image nearly align with some direction in the grid, but not quite, lines are formed that suddenly jump from one grid row to another and we notice it (much like if we took a length of the Great Wall equal to its thickness, we could not of course see this block from space, yet we can see the wall as a whole). With 35mm film no such jump occurs from one grid row to the next because no such grid exists. Similarly, on a monitor, consider just how slightly off convergence must be to cause you great annoyance and eye strain.
(I recently came across a technique in Photoshop called "loosening edges"...a way of adding a tiny bit of random noise only to all the edges in an image that are very nearly horizontally or vertically aligned that actually improves the image.)
Besides just issues concerning pure resolution, there are many other issues that affect image quality, things viewers can be both conscious of and not. At some point increases in resolution go unnoticed for the most part, but images on a higher resolution matrix will seem more dimensional, somehow more real and less confined to a plane. This is a psychological effect that has to do with the ability of the monitor to exactly reproduce blur. Yup, if the parts of the image that aren't in focus aren't exactly blurred the same way your eye would perceive things, your mind picks up on the differences between the distance ratios and expected blurs, and some part of your brain becomes remotely aware that something's off.
We are, of course, in the realm of fine structure in this whole discussion. 15 years ago, talking about the difference between EGA and VGA (any of you kids out there remember EGA?) was like comparing soda to wine. Now we're comparing a fine Montrachet to a more inexpensive but high-quality Napa Merlot; as we spend more time drinking high-falutin' wine, the difference becomes important enough to pay big bucks for.
You get a single card that can store all your info, and a card reader at home. You slip the card in before you head out and unlock all the elements of it using the card reader and some kind of authentication thing like a public key (I like codes that thieves will not expect you to know off the top of your head, like a 4-digit PIN--that's dangerous...but can you see a crook saying, "Give me your Universal Card and your public key"?). You could say, unlock all my credit and debit until 8pm tonight, and leave the Visa and Mastercard unlocked until 10pm.
You have to choose a default credit account that stays on all the time, but if you make too many purchases with it while the rest of the card is locked, the credit card company calls you and lets you know. That's it. They don't shut it off, they don't even have to have a live person call you. They just call you and say, "Someone's charging on your locked card, is it you?"
Of course, if you prefer the credit company to be liable, then you have to allow them to shut it off if purchases don't match your typical buying profile whether it's locked or unlocked. If you want the freedom to never have your card shut off, then you agree to pay the charges.
I don't see the point of keeping things the way they are. I don't know about you guys, but I keep all my credit cards right next to each other, so if I ever get mugged, I'm going to lose them all anyway, along with my ID. So I say stick 'em all on the same piece of plastic so I only have to track one thing. And you have to admit, it's definitely more secure than cash any way you cut it. Someone gets your cash, and what recourse do you have?
This CHECK ID thing is not the be-all end-all that everyone seems to think it is. It still leaves the signature off the card, which is a critical element to making the match.
Best thing to do (and I don't do this) is sign the card, and on the right side of the white stripe in big sharpie ink, put CHECK ID. That provides the best security but only if the noodges actually check your ID, which they're supposed do anyway, but more than 90% don't.
That's true...but the money's already gone and you have to convince them that it was stolen and they should put all the money back, 'cept $50. More difficult and risky to do than just not pay in the first place.
Right now I won't use Java because I write GUI intensive applications that are slow and quirky in Java.
When was the last time you wrote a GUI in Java? I don't find them slow or quirky at all for the last few years.
For those who use GUIs, Java is not cross-platform. Java requires Java to be installed, and it isn't installed on recent copies of Windows. "Cross-platform" is not completely true.
Um...having to install Java on the client doesn't mean it's not cross-platform. Not having to recompile the class files you distribute makes it cross-platform. And you can, indeed, do this with Java. I think perhaps the reason you don't like Java is because you don't understand its benefits and features, possibly?
I will quite possibly have the distinction of being the only serious poster in response to this question.:)
I think the march of technology creates anxiety in non-technical people because it presents managers (for example) with decisions that they can't understand at a deep level...most can understand it at a meaningful level, but not as deeply as they'd like. This puts them somewhat at the mercy of the technical people under them who are typically engaged in some level of religious wars over said technology.
The insecurity and indecisiveness that result from this situation does cause the technical people stress. The solution is not to do away with technology, but to cross train people so they can understand the business person's position and viewpoint, and vice versa.
Wow, bust out the extra-thick tinfoil hats. Budweiser keeps track of their sales? The nerve!
Come on, what are they supposed to do? Not know how they're doing against their competition? Information in the aggregate is a good thing as long as it doesn't identify you individually. If you really want to be scared, think about the fact that every company tracks their sales. You can't escape! The big bad man knows everything you buy!
I don't recall freedom of expression in Britain...I think that's why we left!:-)
Seriously--even in the US local communities are able to pass laws about what they consider illegally obscene. I live in California though, so that sort of thing doesn't apply to me. hehehe
Years ago, when I was in my Street Fighter II Turbo days, I used to go to an arcade in Fox Valley, IL. They had an arcade game there that had a flat screen and the characters would stand up out of it, much like the pictures show attached to this story. So this technology has been around for years, and I always wondered when it was going to pop up again for mainstream use.
The real question is: does anyone know what the name of that arcade game was? I'd love to be able to prove what I'm saying by providing a googled link...but I can't remember. It was something to do with space travel, I can tell you that much...and it played more like a choose your own adventure than an action game.
Everyone's saying how easy it is to put back doors in and keep them invisible. That's not really the point. MS always talked about security through obfuscation, one of the supposed advantages of keeping source code to themselves. But the real truth is, it places the power to corrupt in the hands of a few, and that is a problem. It's a problem because what if people did build back doors into Windows source? How would anyone know, regardless of how obvious they were? What if the source gets out (as it recently did)?
But the real issue is: what if someone finds a security hole that looks a lot more like an intentional back door than a mistake? With Windows, what are the chances anyone'd be able to prove that without the source? There'd always be doubters no matter how tight the case. On the other hand, with the code the NSA just released, if anyone were to find an obvious back door--even what looked like an intentionally sloppy hole--how do you suppose that would play for the most secretive, shadowy government organization?
The right answer is: not too well. The good thing about open source is that it invites you to try this kind of subterfuge, but it forces you to stake your credibility on that gamble. With all the propeller heads and tinfoil hats floating around the linux community, that's a pretty bad bet. And you know what, I'm allowed to say this only because there's such a large contingent of linux people that will read this argument and not believe it's enough to keep linux secure. There's a lot that will say, sure that's a fine and dandy argument, but I prefer to check it out for myself. And it's exactly this disagreement, this marketplace of conflicting ideas, that makes my statement above true...because these are exactly the same people that would expose these back doors.
It's like -1 trying to make itself more negative by multiplying itself by another -1. Wait a minute...it's not like that at all.
What if they discovered they could shrink down an entire 8086 processor to Truly Ridiculous Proportions (that's a technical term) and pile like a thousand or a million of them into the space of a single modern day chip? Ok, since we're a 32-bit world now maybe we'd need to go to bunches of 386's instead. But the point remains--I wonder what kind of modifications to current software would have to be made to exploit this, or if it could all be done in hardware.
It'd be massively parallel computing. Like a human brain. Slow at methodical linear tasks like adding a list of numbers, fast at intuitive tasks like modding this post down to -1.
To anyone that wants us to reduce our nuclear stockpiles to save humanity this has got to be an interesting problem. If we take this problem seriously, I can see the US government saying that the most powerful weapons developed thus far are not even a significant start towards protecting the Earth. We're going to need, like, a Really Big Boom to save us.
I can't wait to hear the non-nuke alternative suggestions for this one: "Let's build a giant water cannon in the North Atlantic--the Earth is mostly water, after all!". Once again, a disparaged human technological advance is going to be put to good use in a way no one had previously thought about.
I don't get it. So you authenticate the source. Big flippin' deal. I don't know the source of every single email I'll ever want to get, so knowing the source isn't going to help me have a spam-free inbox.
This jump you speak of would be mightily significant if they were just starting out as businesses. Most of the people on/. here want to make this Intel-following-AMD into A Thing. Well it's not A Thing. It's not even SomeThing.
Then again, it's Not Nothing. But it's definitely not SomeThing.
Intel was first in at the beginning, and no one's been able to catch them since...they have the market penetration that they're not too worried about following AMD--people will still wait for Intel and people will still buy Intel. They don't have to be first anymore, they just have to be there.
Here's what I wonder...has backwards-compatibility caused hardware to get so kludgy that things would actually run faster if we designed a brand new system and ran an Intel-compatible VM in firmware? I think yes...and that would provide the perfect opportunity for companies to transition to a new platform over a number of years. I think we need to free ourselves from the rules that applied to the 8086 soon.
It's pretty good...pretty good. You know, I tellya, though...I'm just not there yet with the cow bell. Don't be shy now, just really get into it and let that cow bell shine.
Here let me show you what I'm talking about: bink ceswiedler bink writes bink "KernelTrap bink is bink running bink a bink thread bink on bink the BINK!!! Linux-Kernel BINK mailing BINK! list BINK about bink Intel's bink new...
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I hate to break it to you guys, but the guy who's at fault ain't gettin' the blame. You know why? He left the company already.
If there's one thing I've learned in the working world, the last guy who left the company is always at fault.
sev
I would posit that it's nearly impossible for any group of intelligent folks to converse about a shared topic of interest without jargon.
sev
English is so rich a language, in fact, that we naturally learn it as a meta-language instead of directly as a language. This is how we are able to decode the meaning of slang phrases that we've never heard before...these phrases strike a chord with us because they evoke imagery that is indirectly or obliquely referred to by phrasology with which we're already intimate. Even when expressing ourselves to audiences of unsurpassed erudition, we ought always sedulously eschew unmitigated hyperverbosity, obfuscatory redundancy, and munificent prolixity.
Sure, you may have understood the last half of that increasingly dense paragraph, but it took a lot of work on your part didn't it? So what are we after: communication or correct but unnatural verbiage? You must remember that language evolves...though I will concede that it does not evolve as well if we do not participate in it.
I go for a middle-of-the-road approach. I expect that people should know the common, everyday words because these words lend themselves to actually enhancing your clarity of thought. It's true--you actually become smarter in immeasurable ways by knowing the difference between "their" and "there", "loose" and "lose", "your" and "you're". People who misuse these kinds of words send a valuable message to their readers: I'm an idiot, I can't handle the simplest aspects of my native tongue (foreigners are forgiven their trespasses in this regard), don't pay attention to what I say but instead feel sad for me. I'm more forgiving with things like "octopuses" vs "octopi" (both are valid), "viruses" and "virii" (only the former--not all words ending in "-us" are created equal), mainly because these people are cute and they amuse me in their quest to impress us with their creative applications of Latin etymology.
Less amusing to me is when dictionaries disagree. It turns out that Merriam-Webster has decided that "noo-kyuh-ler" is valid...though they note that it is a pronunciation (pronOunciation? ha! homework for you) "disapproved of by many", it still made it in as a secondary (and yes, this was M-W's policy at least as far back as 1997, long before Bush Jr.). Dictionary.com notes the usage without elevating it to the status of the proper. Many people don't realize this, but these linguistic decisions are taken by an annual meeting of professors and language experts at Oxford University. Occasionally the results of these meetings can be very surprising--the last one of these meetings was about six weeks ago, and they removed a word (due to underuse) which I had always considered untouchable: "gullible". So give the on-line dictionaries a chance to catch up, but searches for this word will go unresolved in few months' time.
sev
Part of what makes this discussion so difficult is that these two OSes are undoubtedly aimed at (or at least enjoyed by) different target audiences. Linux/UNIX users can justifiably argue that these OSes come "out of the box" poorly configured for security, but that's fine. Windows users can hardly make the same argument given the type of user that OS is aimed at (this is not a slam, it's just a simple statement of fact that my Grammy-maw isn't going to use Linux anytime soon).
What if iMacs were delivered with poor security? Is this more or less of a problem than delivering a corporate UNIX server that has a staff of administrators to configure it?
sev
The problem for would-be virus-writers on the Linux platform is that there is more ego-weight on the side of fixing and protecting Linux than on the side of embarrassing that platform and bringing it down. Besides, Linux users are by definition more intimately knowledgable about their computers and more likely to keep up with news, patches, updates, etc.
Viruses are an ego-based affair. There is more interest in protecting Linux than harming it, so any virus that comes out would probably find that the security hole closed long before it achieved penetration worth bragging rights.
Of all the socially challenged hackers out there, there are at least a few that hate Linux and would like to bring it down. It hasn't happened though for more reasons than Microsofties would like to admit.
sev
I disagree with you wholeheartedly. While I have better things to do than write viruses, I think the people that do it contribute to software in an unignorable, public way. They exercise complex systems in ways that companies themselves would otherwise refuse. As we become more and more advanced as a society, our software systems take control over more and more elements of our daily lives.
The catchword for this discussion is: robustness. We absolutely need our systems to be robust if we're going to depend on them. Let's say for a time we were somehow able to figure out a way to get people to stop writing viruses and probing security in general. Companies would undoubtedly get lazy, and the whole thing would get saved up for one big cataclysmic event per major software system once some foreign company/government/organized crime/terrorist group had something big to gain.
Think about banking software...a foreign group figures out how to exploit bank software, and because we're so naive we've never written any code that prevents it into our banking software. Think about the economy...a terrorist organization could strike us from wherever they are simply by probing for years and years, and then unleashing hell on earth with major coordinated attacks. Think about governments--these are less for the big-style public attacks, but they could tease out information about their own citizens or those of other countries and have information they shouldn't.
The fact is, we shouldn't be scared of the guy hacking in his basement...we should welcome his attacks and take responsibility for thwarting them, because if a guy with an 486 running Linux in his basement can hack a corporate server that contains sensitive data, or infect everyone's desktop machines at home with some viral code, what could a big company or country do with millions of dollars in resources? Your approach needlessly puts us at the whim of those who are able and have better reasons for hacking into our personal affairs.
Also, consider the fact that advances in one area (security) often contribute to advances in other areas--someday we may advanced methods of brute force security when we move to an AI model...not to protect systems from people necessarily, but from the probes and attacks of an evolving and not always controllable computer system. This is a contrived point, but we need to make sure we've evolved in all areas to the point of being able to control our future when any one area gets advanced enough.
sev
I think you missed the point, sir. The point I was trying to make is that I was enthusiastically willing to engage the company's policy and did so. But, because the policy was suboptimal (not for me, mind you...for the company) it ended up costing the company far more than if they'd just done the smart thing. The touchstone for all of that was my legal right to deduct my business expenses, and the necessity to completely separate business from personal expenses due to the complicated tax code. This is not what I would have preferred, but like I said, I'm a company man and I'll do what's good for the company and my country!
You know, it hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but what if everyone happened to have the same difficulties in pursuing their absolute, irrefutable rights to separate the business expenses imposed upon them by their companies from their personal lives? I'm just thinking out loud here, but if this same thing happened to everyone, gosh golly, I think companies would end up spending a lot of money and not getting much of the extra work their employees are all too willing to pitch in. Even though their employees are willing to sacrifice for the good of the company, the policy would suck up all the projected savings from such a policy and then some.
sev
I had this happen at a previous company. But I was smart about it--I planned on writing off every dime I paid for work-related expenses. This turns out to be very difficult to do if you use your personal items part of the time for business and part of the time for personal use. So the only logical conclusion: get separate items you can use 100% for business, and that way you can write those off 100% without fear of getting audited by the IRS. When I explained this to my manager, she balked but I asked if they would allow me to expense professional tax services (around $400/year) and she said no. The upshot is, when they tell you to pay for these things out of your own pocket, you can choose to do it any way you want to...after all, it's your money, right? :)
I had good cell service and an awesome broadband connection already...so I couldn't justify spending a lot on a second cell and Internet connection, which was necessary for the aforementioned tax purposes. I found a cell provider that had a pay-as-you-go plan...use no minutes that month, and pay no money other than a $1.95 monthly service charge to keep the account open...and I got a free cell phone to boot for signing up (there was like a $50 activation fee, but I was allowed to expense this based on the argument that I already had a cell, I was only doing this for tax purposes and the good of the company, so I didn't want to pay a second activation fee). By deferring to choose a plan that included any minutes, I effectively had a zero minute plan that shuttled all callers directly to voicemail (I would explain that I couldn't afford a lot of minutes, and I couldn't afford a plan for the business phone that included a lot of minutes...and oh yea, I signed a three year contract so no changies! Unless the company wants to let me expense the $150 early termination fee). The good thing is my voicemail could be picked up on the web or forwarded to my email in the form of a wav file, so I didn't need to spend minutes checking it.
This didn't work out so well, so ultimately my manager agreed to deal with my situation as a special case and allow me to expense an inexpensive fixed minute plan. But wouldn't ya know it...just as soon as one thing is addressed, another takes its place! It turns out that the free cell phone I got with the plan had a set of expensive, proprietary batteries that easily set a memory. Little did I know! But within a few weeks of having the phone, the one set of batteries it came with would only go about 5 minutes on a full charge. I was allowed to expense another set for around $80, but those quickly set the same memory at around 5 minutes of talk time. I just couldn't remember to fully cycle those things before charging them for the life of me!
I found a 9600bps modem in my dad's basement and was able to find a service provider that offered very cheap 24kbps connections...the downside of course is that it would drop the connection every few minutes, but what do you expect for $3.95/month? Fortunately, the ISP also provided an email inbox/forwarding service so I could keep the separation between my personal and business life very clean and clear for the IRS. Unfortunately, that forwarding service never seemed to work! And that was unfortunate because that's where all those voicemails from my cell service were getting forwarded to. Oh well!
I felt that since the business cell and the dialup account were purely for business it was completely justified for me to make all research, purchase, setup, and customer support calls from the office during the normal workday. I quickly learned that even the simplest of issues can be quite time-consuming to deal with over the phone. If things got too busy at work, some showstopping problem on my cell plan or dial-up account might not get dealt with for weeks! Finally, I had to schedule several-hour long appointments with myself in Microsoft Outlook to make these support calls and get these problems sorted out. And I did generate a lot of suppo
You're right, though, at some point the human eye can no longer discern a "real" difference between two screen resolutions, though it's apparently higher than we thought before digital cameras came along. Now that the professional photographers have come along with their interpretation of digital images versus 35mm film, I've read that digital images have to be much better, resolution-wise, than 35mm film to equate to the same level of image quality.
What's that, you say, that doesn't make sense! Well, as it happens, 35mm film is coated with photosensitive crystals that, when exposed to light, chemically react with the film substrate and expose it. These crystals are randomly oriented and have no discernable pattern. Images falling on the backplane of a digital camera, on the other hand, are captured onto a predefined grid pattern, usually a repeating rectangular grid, sometimes a hexagonal one, but nevertheless a repeating grid.
The human eye is very adept at picking up repeating regular patterns, even very tiny ones. The individual dots themselves may be too small to see, but lines in the image nearly align with some direction in the grid, but not quite, lines are formed that suddenly jump from one grid row to another and we notice it (much like if we took a length of the Great Wall equal to its thickness, we could not of course see this block from space, yet we can see the wall as a whole). With 35mm film no such jump occurs from one grid row to the next because no such grid exists. Similarly, on a monitor, consider just how slightly off convergence must be to cause you great annoyance and eye strain.
(I recently came across a technique in Photoshop called "loosening edges"...a way of adding a tiny bit of random noise only to all the edges in an image that are very nearly horizontally or vertically aligned that actually improves the image.)
Besides just issues concerning pure resolution, there are many other issues that affect image quality, things viewers can be both conscious of and not. At some point increases in resolution go unnoticed for the most part, but images on a higher resolution matrix will seem more dimensional, somehow more real and less confined to a plane. This is a psychological effect that has to do with the ability of the monitor to exactly reproduce blur. Yup, if the parts of the image that aren't in focus aren't exactly blurred the same way your eye would perceive things, your mind picks up on the differences between the distance ratios and expected blurs, and some part of your brain becomes remotely aware that something's off.
We are, of course, in the realm of fine structure in this whole discussion. 15 years ago, talking about the difference between EGA and VGA (any of you kids out there remember EGA?) was like comparing soda to wine. Now we're comparing a fine Montrachet to a more inexpensive but high-quality Napa Merlot; as we spend more time drinking high-falutin' wine, the difference becomes important enough to pay big bucks for.
sev
What do you think of this?
You get a single card that can store all your info, and a card reader at home. You slip the card in before you head out and unlock all the elements of it using the card reader and some kind of authentication thing like a public key (I like codes that thieves will not expect you to know off the top of your head, like a 4-digit PIN--that's dangerous...but can you see a crook saying, "Give me your Universal Card and your public key"?). You could say, unlock all my credit and debit until 8pm tonight, and leave the Visa and Mastercard unlocked until 10pm.
You have to choose a default credit account that stays on all the time, but if you make too many purchases with it while the rest of the card is locked, the credit card company calls you and lets you know. That's it. They don't shut it off, they don't even have to have a live person call you. They just call you and say, "Someone's charging on your locked card, is it you?"
Of course, if you prefer the credit company to be liable, then you have to allow them to shut it off if purchases don't match your typical buying profile whether it's locked or unlocked. If you want the freedom to never have your card shut off, then you agree to pay the charges.
I don't see the point of keeping things the way they are. I don't know about you guys, but I keep all my credit cards right next to each other, so if I ever get mugged, I'm going to lose them all anyway, along with my ID. So I say stick 'em all on the same piece of plastic so I only have to track one thing. And you have to admit, it's definitely more secure than cash any way you cut it. Someone gets your cash, and what recourse do you have?
sev
This CHECK ID thing is not the be-all end-all that everyone seems to think it is. It still leaves the signature off the card, which is a critical element to making the match.
Best thing to do (and I don't do this) is sign the card, and on the right side of the white stripe in big sharpie ink, put CHECK ID. That provides the best security but only if the noodges actually check your ID, which they're supposed do anyway, but more than 90% don't.
sev
That's true...but the money's already gone and you have to convince them that it was stolen and they should put all the money back, 'cept $50. More difficult and risky to do than just not pay in the first place.
sev
sev
I will quite possibly have the distinction of being the only serious poster in response to this question. :)
I think the march of technology creates anxiety in non-technical people because it presents managers (for example) with decisions that they can't understand at a deep level...most can understand it at a meaningful level, but not as deeply as they'd like. This puts them somewhat at the mercy of the technical people under them who are typically engaged in some level of religious wars over said technology.
The insecurity and indecisiveness that result from this situation does cause the technical people stress. The solution is not to do away with technology, but to cross train people so they can understand the business person's position and viewpoint, and vice versa.
sev
Remember Neo was the Christ figure who was fighting against The Matri"XP" Reloaded...he was the good guy. :-)
I'd like to continue this conversation, but look out--sentinels.
sev
Wow, bust out the extra-thick tinfoil hats. Budweiser keeps track of their sales? The nerve!
Come on, what are they supposed to do? Not know how they're doing against their competition? Information in the aggregate is a good thing as long as it doesn't identify you individually. If you really want to be scared, think about the fact that every company tracks their sales. You can't escape! The big bad man knows everything you buy!
sev
I don't recall freedom of expression in Britain...I think that's why we left! :-)
Seriously--even in the US local communities are able to pass laws about what they consider illegally obscene. I live in California though, so that sort of thing doesn't apply to me. hehehe
sev
Did you guys see this article? The pager is the least of our worries...
sev
Years ago, when I was in my Street Fighter II Turbo days, I used to go to an arcade in Fox Valley, IL. They had an arcade game there that had a flat screen and the characters would stand up out of it, much like the pictures show attached to this story. So this technology has been around for years, and I always wondered when it was going to pop up again for mainstream use.
The real question is: does anyone know what the name of that arcade game was? I'd love to be able to prove what I'm saying by providing a googled link...but I can't remember. It was something to do with space travel, I can tell you that much...and it played more like a choose your own adventure than an action game.
sev
Everyone's saying how easy it is to put back doors in and keep them invisible. That's not really the point. MS always talked about security through obfuscation, one of the supposed advantages of keeping source code to themselves. But the real truth is, it places the power to corrupt in the hands of a few, and that is a problem. It's a problem because what if people did build back doors into Windows source? How would anyone know, regardless of how obvious they were? What if the source gets out (as it recently did)?
But the real issue is: what if someone finds a security hole that looks a lot more like an intentional back door than a mistake? With Windows, what are the chances anyone'd be able to prove that without the source? There'd always be doubters no matter how tight the case. On the other hand, with the code the NSA just released, if anyone were to find an obvious back door--even what looked like an intentionally sloppy hole--how do you suppose that would play for the most secretive, shadowy government organization?
The right answer is: not too well. The good thing about open source is that it invites you to try this kind of subterfuge, but it forces you to stake your credibility on that gamble. With all the propeller heads and tinfoil hats floating around the linux community, that's a pretty bad bet. And you know what, I'm allowed to say this only because there's such a large contingent of linux people that will read this argument and not believe it's enough to keep linux secure. There's a lot that will say, sure that's a fine and dandy argument, but I prefer to check it out for myself. And it's exactly this disagreement, this marketplace of conflicting ideas, that makes my statement above true...because these are exactly the same people that would expose these back doors.
It's like -1 trying to make itself more negative by multiplying itself by another -1. Wait a minute...it's not like that at all.
sev
What if they discovered they could shrink down an entire 8086 processor to Truly Ridiculous Proportions (that's a technical term) and pile like a thousand or a million of them into the space of a single modern day chip? Ok, since we're a 32-bit world now maybe we'd need to go to bunches of 386's instead. But the point remains--I wonder what kind of modifications to current software would have to be made to exploit this, or if it could all be done in hardware.
It'd be massively parallel computing. Like a human brain. Slow at methodical linear tasks like adding a list of numbers, fast at intuitive tasks like modding this post down to -1.
sev
To anyone that wants us to reduce our nuclear stockpiles to save humanity this has got to be an interesting problem. If we take this problem seriously, I can see the US government saying that the most powerful weapons developed thus far are not even a significant start towards protecting the Earth. We're going to need, like, a Really Big Boom to save us.
I can't wait to hear the non-nuke alternative suggestions for this one: "Let's build a giant water cannon in the North Atlantic--the Earth is mostly water, after all!". Once again, a disparaged human technological advance is going to be put to good use in a way no one had previously thought about.
sev
___
Start stem cell research NOW!
I don't get it. So you authenticate the source. Big flippin' deal. I don't know the source of every single email I'll ever want to get, so knowing the source isn't going to help me have a spam-free inbox.
sev
This jump you speak of would be mightily significant if they were just starting out as businesses. Most of the people on /. here want to make this Intel-following-AMD into A Thing. Well it's not A Thing. It's not even SomeThing.
Then again, it's Not Nothing. But it's definitely not SomeThing.
Intel was first in at the beginning, and no one's been able to catch them since...they have the market penetration that they're not too worried about following AMD--people will still wait for Intel and people will still buy Intel. They don't have to be first anymore, they just have to be there.
Here's what I wonder...has backwards-compatibility caused hardware to get so kludgy that things would actually run faster if we designed a brand new system and ran an Intel-compatible VM in firmware? I think yes...and that would provide the perfect opportunity for companies to transition to a new platform over a number of years. I think we need to free ourselves from the rules that applied to the 8086 soon.
sev
It's pretty good...pretty good. You know, I tellya, though...I'm just not there yet with the cow bell. Don't be shy now, just really get into it and let that cow bell shine.
Here let me show you what I'm talking about: bink ceswiedler bink writes bink "KernelTrap bink is bink running bink a bink thread bink on bink the BINK!!! Linux-Kernel BINK mailing BINK! list BINK about bink Intel's bink new...
That felt good.
sev