* but I'd hate for anyone to aim for a "correct it later" attitude as the norm in writing.
Then you are unfamiliar with the business of writing and how most professional writers work.
* You could compare it to programming.
I could. In programming, one also finds that things like security must be done in a separate pass to be done well. That's why folks who try to just spit out secure code end up with things like Windows, while folks who do separate security audit passes have a much better track record of achieving their goal.
The #1 thing I would make sure I taught engineers is to separate writing from editing. The most common "I hate to write" problem I find in fellow engineers is that no one ever taught them to do the work in (at least) two phases.
First, do the writing: get all your ideas down as fast as you can without worrying about structure, or complete sentences or anything except putting everything down that you can think of.
Second, do the editing. Now look at your big pile of ideas and think about what the right order for things is, how to start and finish it, what to throw out, what things go best together, and eventually even sentence-level details like grammar.
8 times out of 10 when I have an engineer staring at two sentences on an otherwise blank screen, it's because they think it has to spool out onto the page in linear, perfected form right from the start.
That's why I added the comment about how it looks from above, since it's not clear any two people would agree on what rotating "outward" might mean. It's hard to describe body movement in text, but I'll try again.
First, sit down. Second, bend your arms so that your elbows are at your side, and your palms are in front of your face, kinda like you're holding an imaginary book. Next, clench palms into fist. Now rotate your fists as far as they will go.
Which direction to rotate the fists? Well you can see the "view from above" description again. Another way to put it is that your pinky fingers twist towards your body, not away from your body. Again, from above (looking down from the ceiling), that will look like the right fist is rotating counter-clockwise, and the left fist is rotating clockwise.
Hold the stretch for 10-15 seconds.
I usually do the stretch at the first sign of soreness, then repeat the stretch (only takes 15 seconds after all) every 20-30 minutes thereafter until I don't have a problem any more (I usually just forget to stop stretching shortly after I don't have any more soreness:-).
I used to get the forearm/wrist pains when I played too much Civ or (more rarely) had too many long coding sessions. While leafing through a book on the science of stretching, I came across this comment that the authors had never failed to remedy RSI in the arms quickly with a particular stretch. Tried it. Works for me. I'm damn lazy, so I don't do the stretch until the pain starts to come. Knocks it down pretty quick.
You basically hold your hands up in front of you, palms facing you. Then make a tight fist, and rotate each fist to the outside as far as it will go. Fists will tend to pull downward, which is fine. (Looking from above, the right fist rotates counter clockwise while the left first rotates clockwise.) Hold the stretch for about 10-15 seconds.
For me, this has been the absolute cheapest, simplest, and laziest way to deal with RSI from typing.
Another sloppy-to-the-point-of-unintellible SlashDot synopsis.
Geez, I know I don't pay for a subscription, and I know SlashDot doesn't claim to be any kind of professional writing at all, but...
When your website's one-and-only purpose for existing is to communicate information, don't you think it's worth at least minor efforts to avoid miscommunication like this?
It's really not that hard, either. You could probably find a highly qualified copyeditor or three who could do such small piece-work on demand from home for a very modest fee. Or, if you have zero budget for improving quality, simply having each non-professional writer require a careful reading of their piece from one or two of the other non-professional writers there before posting ought to prevent complete garbage like this sentence from making it in.
Please consider doing something to improve your process. Some mistakes are funny, but total opacity is not so entertaining.
Just be sure you also examined the source (all umpteen megs of it) for your compiler and all other tools (e.g. linker) you'll be using in the process, since it is an ancient and classic hack to simply infect a compiler to always include generated malware, and then throw away the hacked source to the compiler so that everyone thinks it's hunky dory.
Not as simple as you thought, huh?
The zen garden is particularly emblematic of what you're likely to get if you pay a "web designer" to make your website. It totally ignores what typical website customer needs are:
They mostly use IE.
They mostly want pages to load quickly (look at those piggy graphics)
They mostly have older eyes that can't comfortably read small fonts (look at all the glitches on those websites when you set View|Text|Largest)
Website designers like this are also clueless about the needs of they people who pay for website design. There is really no point in jumping through tons of hoops with cluttered codes just to get three columns that still don't quite work right in all conditions when you can just use an HTML table to do the same thing in 1/10th the complexity.
They generally still end up doing a miserable job at separating presentation from content.
The only good way to make websites that have to be maintained is to generate the websites. That way, you can use tables, CSS, whatever-you-like, and know that you can change your mind site-wide just by changing the generating code.
Always use fresh tapes for important events and record them, completely, with the lens cap on then rewind to retension and create a proper timecode on the entire tape.
You came to expose one myth and reinforce another, it seems. That "proper timecode" idea is based on the incorrect assumption that the bits you layed down during the "blank record" will hit the record head in exactly the same spot when you later do your "real" record. Ain't gonna happen. Tapes sag and stretch, and only a minute amount of same is required to put those timecode bits in the wrong spot. By the time you're 30 minutes of tape into it, that original timecode just ain't gonna be in sync with what you're recording now.
How about this instead: "pack" your blank tape by first fast-forwarding and then rewinding. If the manufacturer accidentally left a spot that was not firmly rewound, this *might* fix that. Then record about 30 seconds of blank tape (most tape damage allegedly occurs at the front, so you don't want your precious video to start there).
Finally, the real rule on the timecode problem: Always start a new record by backing up a bit from the last one. This is a problem when you record in several pieces with some video reviewing in-between, not really a problem if you're just recording from start to finish in one sitting. If you know you're going to stop recording and review, just put the lens cap on and record an extra 10 seconds trailer. Be sure to position the tape into that trailer before you start recording again. That'll keep you from having messed-up timecodes.
I never have dropouts.
Maybe. Or maybe you just have software/hardware that can't or won't inform you of dropouts. Maybe you're getting dropped frames here and there all the time and you just never know the difference.
Time to dig out once again my copy of the original paper on Hungarian notation in which Simonyi clearly says it's designed to *not* be mnemonic, that it's better to have unintelligible variable names. In later revisionist papers, he backs off of that -- the notation itself is still it's good old unintelligible anti-mnemonic self, though.
Cancer is not rare at all, as we know from autopsies conducted on car crash victims. For example, if you are over 50, there's a high probability that you have thyroid cancer -- it's just that the thyroid tumor is sitting there, not growing, and probably never would grow (we know that from the rates of how many people actually develop symptoms of thyroid cancer). This is the point of the anti-angiogenic approach to attacking cancer: the difference between tumors that just sit there and tumors that grow to kill people is their ability to grow new blood vessels to feed themselves. Prevent the formation of new blood vessels, and you don't prevent cancer, but you prevent death from cancer.
Exactly. The paper contains no information on curing anyone that I can see. The news report claims the scientists "used a mathematical formula to create a treatment based on neutrofiles". Huh? Does "neutrofiles" mean "nuetrophils" (the most common type of white blood cell)? If so, what did the treatment consist of? Injections of white blood cells? How in the world would that be tailored via a mathematical analysis, and what information did they take from the tumor that would allow such tailoring?
Sigh. It's always so frustrating trying to make heads or tales out of news accounts of medical research.
It is interesting the paper generally downplays the importance of angiogenesis in tumor growth. Yet I could not immediately see how their theory could otherwise explain the large number of cancer tumors we know are harmless, precisely because they cannot grow blood vessels. I chuckle a bit at their comment that factors such as angiogenesis may influence growth merely by "allowing it or not". Pardon me if my immediate inclination is to reach for the on/off switch rather than fractal math!
I can never quite grasp the argument that CSS is good because it helps separate content from presentation. Every CSS-enabled web page I look at has all kinds of non-content crud in the page.
Me, I write in XML. Any kind of XML I want. Any XML structure that best fits the type of document I'm working on. I've got XSLT to transform it into {really old HTML; HTML 4.0 strict; XHTML + CSS; whatever the boss wants tomorrow}.
Does adding that XSLT translation layer have to cost a lot? C'mon, we're programmers -- it really doesn't have to be a big deal unless it has to. For example, if you've got basically static pages, then you can just use make to automatically regenerate the.html page when its.xml source changes.
If you think you're separating content from presentation via CSS, you should try your hand at Plain Old XML for content, with XSLT to insulate you utterly/completely/totally from the presentation. (OK, I confess: tables still tend to be tables, and I have no shame about naming my tags table/tr/td when the custom equivalent really introduces no particular new semantic value.)
The first big mistake webmasters make when trying to understand how Google ranks search results is failing to grasp the idea of data mining. The Google folks come from a data mining background, the constantly write about data mining algorithms, it would be highly surprising if the bulk of the Google algorithm was not constructed via data mining.
What does that mean? At the highest level, it means that most of the Google algorithm is constructed by a machine. You give the machine human-constructed examples of how to rank a sample set of pages (notice those want ads where Google is hiring people who can inspect and assess the quality of web pages?) and it then uses essentially brute-force techniques to test every possible combination of your ranking variables to find the simplest formula that ranks pages the same way the human did.
There is no human at Google "twisting dials" to alter individual parameters of a formula. The machine constructs the algorithm, and it can therefore easily be so complex that no human can understand it. Tweaking the algorithm becomes a process of changing or adding to your "training set" of human-ranked pages, and letting the data mining process come up with a revised algorithm.
For example, Google could invent a new variable called "category", and identify each page as belonging to category Astronomy, Botulism, Country, [...] and Other. Once that variable is thrown into the mix, then the Google "aglorithm" is essentially free to vary wildly from one type of subject matter to the next. For example, you might see someone with a Real Estate site swearing up and down that inbound links are no longer as important, while someone with an Astronomy site might swear that, no, inbound links are more important than ever. You can see exactly this kind of bickering in most of the forums that people who hope to do Search Engine Optimization frequent.
The other big mistake people make in trying to see how to game the Google algorithm is "delay". In studying how people manage (or fail to manage) complex systems, psychologists learned that people generally would fail if a delay was introduced between their actions and the results of their actions.
In one very simple test, people were charged with trying to stabilize the temperature in a virtual refridgerator. They had one dial, and there was exactly one piece of feedback: the current temperature in the fridge. However, they were not explicitly told that there was a delay between moving the dial and when the results of that action would stabilize.
The responses of those test subjects was eerily similar to what we see in Google-gaming webmasters these days. Some people swore up and down that some human behind the scenes was directly tweaking the results to thwart whatever they did. Others became frustrated and decided that nothing they did really mattered, so they would just swing the dial back and forth between its minimum and maximum settings.
What does this have to do with Google? These days, Google can change their algorithm relatively frequently, and the algorithm can vary by the relative date of various things. The net sum is, there's a delay between when your page is first ranked and when it is likely to arrive at a relatively stable ranking. This can drive webmasters nuts as they think they've done something clever to rank their page high, but then it drops a week later. Although it doesn't occur to them, the important question is: did the change cause the high ranking or did it cause the sudden decline?
The few people who did master the simple refridgerator system? Well, they sounded more like some of the people who are more successful at gaming Google. Those folks tend to say things like: "just make one change and then leave it alone for a while to see what happens."
Can you still game the Google algorithm? Undoubtedly in specific cases. But it's getting harder. The Google algorithm was always complex, but what's changing is that the days when a few variables (such as inbound link count) generally swamped the effects of all the others is drawing to a close. We are approaching the day when the best technique to rank highly with Google will be: sit down at your keyboard and make more good content every day.
Image backups have great attraction. Restoring is done in one big whack, without having to deal with individual applications. Absolutely everything is backed up, so no worries about missing an individual file. etc. So why haven't image backups replaced all other forms of backup?
The reason is the long list of drawbacks.
All your eggs are in one basket. If a single bit of your backup is wrong, then the restore could be screwed -- perhaps in subtle ways that you won't notice until it's too late to undo the damage.
Absolutely everything is backed up. If you've been root kitted, then that's backed up too. If you just destroyed a crucial file prior to the image backup, then that will be missing in the restore.
You really need the partition to be "dead" (unmounted) while it's being backed up. Beware solutions that claim to do "hot" image backups! It is not possible, in the general case, for a backup utility to handle the problem of data consistency. E.g., your application stores some configuration information on disk that happens to require two disk writes. The "hot" image backup software happens to backup the state of the disk after the first write, but before the second. If you then do an install, the disk is corrupted as far as that application is concerned. How many of your applications are paranoid enough to survive arbitrary disk corruption gracefully?
Size versus speed. Look at the curve of how fast disks are getting bigger. Then look at the curve of how fast disk transfer speeds are getting faster. As Jim Gray says, disks are starting to behave more like serial devices. If you've got a 200GB disk to image and you want to keep your backup window down to an hour, you're out of luck.
Lack of versioning. Most disk image backups don't offer versioning, certainly not at the file level. Yet that is perhaps the most common need for a backup -- I just messed up this file and would like to get yesterday's version back, preferably in a few seconds by just pointing and clicking.
Decreased testing. If you're using a versioned form of file backup, you probably get to test it on a fairly regular basis, as people restore accidental file deletions and the like.
How often will you get to test your image backup this month? Then how much confidence can you have that the restore process will work when you really need it?
Image backups certainly have their place for people who can understand their limitations. However, a good, automatic, versioning file backup is almost certainly a higher priority for most computer users. And under some circumstances, they might also want to go with RAID for home computers.
New Removable Media Standard Ignores Media
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USB Flash Drive Round-up
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've long followed and tried to predict the struggle to replace the floppy as the standard for removable media. Finally, I realized that there will be no standard for removable media -- the standard that matters is the interface for removable media, and that prize goes to USB 2.0.
Once there was an interface standard that supported the basic "something that looks like a disk drive" concept, the war was essentially over. Who cares if different people choose flash, or miniature disk, or anything else that might come along? So long as they can all plug into that USB port and behave pretty much the same to your host computer's software, there's no reason to mind that a single removable media format is not king.
What's left for the USB media revolution is its use in bricks and mortar commerce. In the B&M scene, they are constantly trying to create schemes to get you to carry a device (e.g., smartcards) to let them "touch" your data. The information benefits for the B&M store are clear, and the example of store cards ("10% off if you have your QFC card!") shows that they can offer rewards to induce the information sharing.
But who wants to carry 15 different magstripe cards for 15 different stores? The answer is in those little USB devices that more and more people have in their pocket. What's needed is an open standard for sharing data on a USB device -- a standard that lets the customer control what the merchant can store on the card, and what information the customer is willing to share with that merchant.
Consider the following scenario. I walk into a store I've never visited before. They tell me that if I sign up for an "affinity card", I'll get 30% off today's purchase. But now, instead of spending 15 minutes filling out a lengthy form of personal information, I just plug in my disk on key. Up comes a list of personal profiles I've created. I pick the one I'm willing to share with the store, select how much device storage I'm willing to let the store have on my USB device, punch a button, and I'm done!.
When I return that store, I can just plug my pocket USB device into their socket to qualify for discounts.
You can already purchase password database applications designed to run from USB disks. These let you walk up to your Internet cafe machine, plug in your USB disk, and gain access to all your many encrypted passwords for logging into various web sites. There's no reason the same sort of thing can't be extended to "logging in" to B&M stores.
Microsoft has long had a toe in the water with some sort of modest backup.exe included with Windows. But their previous announcement of a full-fledged disk-to-disk backup solution meant that they now see a lot of money flowing into the backup software market, enough to make them want a big piece for themselves.
You can also view this as the typical Microsoft "why don't you partner with us since we don't want to do that -- oh my, look at how much money you're making -- sorry, we have to crush you know". In this case, the hapless partner is Veritas. Last time I talked to someone there, the slightly nervous attitude on Microsoft's threatened rollout was essentially a hope that customers will not really want to trust their data to a Microsoft product.
They may be right. It's certainly somewhat unusual for someone to roll out a big public beta of a backup product -- people generally want to get the feeling that their backup software is free of data-losing bugs at v1.0, not have to wonder if all the 567 bugs reported in the beta period really got fixed and fixed correctly.
If the Microsoft DPM product actually ships, I'm sure Veritas will have some sleepness nights waiting to see if it takes some of their market share. And probably a few more sleepness nights waiting to see if Longhorn will provide some undocumented hooks to Microsoft's product that gives it an edge in doing things like hot backups of particular kinds of data Windows uses.
There seems to be some confusion about hot backup in this thread. Basically, you cannot do a hot backup of an entire disk that maintains integrity without the cooperation of any software that might be running. There's just no way backup software can magically intuit that third-party software is in the midst of a logically atomic operation that required multiple writes to the disk.
Database software that uses transaction protection (which is a minority of all databases on the planet) can, of course, recover integrity even in the face of a backup that does not coordinate operations with it. But the kind of people who would buy Microsoft DPM would probably be running a database that comes with its own hot backup solution.
But the big news here is simply that disk-to-disk backup cannot get more mainstream at this point. It's rapidly gone from a kind of novelty alternative to tape in certain situations to hot new product to so-boring-that-now-even-Microsoft-does-it. There's no shortage of tape installations that will persist because they are simply good enough, but it's getting tougher to find enterprises that are planning a big investment in a new tape backup system.
Consider how many copies of MySQL are running on IDE disks. Do any IDE disks in common use actually support a reliable "tell me when this data is flushed to the magnetic media" operation? It certainly appears that Microsoft doesn't think so.
Therefore, I speculate that few, if any people who switched from MySql to PostgreSQL because of WAL actually understood the likelihood of data loss that remained.
The hot-linked phrase "scheduled launch for STS-114" took me to a page that nowhere claims that May 15th is the scheduled launch date. Now I am left to wonder whether "Zonk" really found a declared launch date, or just confused the first day of the launch window (which does start on May 15th) with an actual statement that NASA is now targeting that specific day.
That clause in the Google TOS would be better rendered as: "we reserve the right to refuse service to any website we don't like."
Whether or not pages were published specifically for the purpose of showing ads is a total judgement call. This is much like the IRS rules for determining whether someone is a contractor or an employee. The final rule at the bottom of the list is essentially: "and if, after all that, we still think you look like an employee, then you're an employee."
People objecting to the use of hard drives for backup miss several points.
Yes, they are (somewhat, not excessively) vulnerable to magnetism. But optical discs are vulnerable to light, fingerprints, chemicals, etc.
Optical discs continue to lag far behind in capacity. So, in the land of audio/video backup, the choice is between a single hard disk, or dozens of optical discs. The risk of failure of multiple optical discs is amplified by the increasing number of discs.
Bandwidth is another issue. Though hard disk bandwidth lags behind the growth of hard disk storage, optical disc bandwidth lags even further behind.
Restore time is another issue. You can line up a bunch of optical disc drives and try to make all your data available at once, but you're probably never going to get the restore speed of solutions like Massive Arrays of Inactive Disks.
There will always be multiple backup solutions, but the biggest trend continues to be towards using hard disks for backup. When your data files are enormous (such as with audio/visual data), HDD backup is even more attractive.
Immediately(!) purchase the stolen software, using a Mastercard or Visa. The resulting download is evidence, and the purchase itself will be used later. Make every effort to identify who (URL, domain name, contact info, company name, etc.) is actually processing this credit card transaction (hint: it's usually not the kid in Pakistan).
Notify the contact info of the domain of the infringement. Use a DMCA-compliant notification.
Notify the next upstream ISP of that domain of same.
Notify the domain's registrar. Some have TOS which forbid illegal activity.
Is the bad guy still up? Then start notifying the credit card processor that they have participated in a sale of stolen goods. Use a letter that calmly documents the date of purchase, how you identified the download as a stolen copy of your software, etc.
When your credit card bill arrives, follow the instructions on the back of the bill to contest that purchase. Inform the credit card company of everything that's happened, including dates and times and copies of correspondence
Join the ASP. It's a chance to notify fellow software producers that their software is being ripped off along with yours (and increase the pressure on a particular pirate site). It's also a way of supporting an organization that works to support your right to make a living selling software.
The linchpin in this effort is credit card processing. I don't care if you live on a small island that you rule yourself, if you take Mastercard/Visa transactions, you rely on American companies and American law. These giant companies grant smaller companies the right to parcel out merchant accounts, and they can cause non-trivial financial pain for merchant accounts that generate too many complaints for them.
The wheels of the law can take much time to grind to a conclusion, and not always in your favor. Visa/Mastercard can issue a $20,000 fine in a much shorter time, and they don't have to consult a jury.
In the Wild West of Internet fraud that involves money flow, Mastercard/Visa is judge, jury, and executioner. Most victims simply don't know enough to bring their case to them, or the amount of fraud would be dropping.
When posting a link to www.forbes.com articles, please note that you have to have cookies (or is it ActiveX and cookies) enabled in order to read it. All I get when I follow the posted link is an infinite loop of "skip this welcome screen", and then when I click on that, a page that redirects right back to the welcome screen (which really just shows an empty box, since I have ActiveX disabled).
Lightscribe Pros and Cons (spc media ain't a con)
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Burn the CD on Both Sides
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've been tracking Lightscribe for much of the year, over at www.backupcritic.com/faq/lightscribe/what.html. After reliably missing its ship dates, I'm starting to believe it may finally be close to appearing.
The need to purchase special media is actually a plus in my book. AFAIK, this will be the first labelling solution for optical discs that was actually designed by people who have to make optical discs work correctly. No spin imbalance due to "painting" on only parts of the disc, no chemicals leaching through to the other side, etc. If I can make a lovely graphical label without worrying that it will decrease the odds the disc will be readable in 5 years, that will likely be worth a modest price penalty in media to me. At this point, there is still no word on what the price penalty will actually be for a drive or for the media.
The real disadvantages are: quite slow to burn (think 20 minutes for a complex graphic) that high-res image, and only monochrome. So, if you sell software, don't think this is going to be a neat way of producing labels for shipped product.
What it will be really cool for is things like handing a home movie DVD to your inlaws with a picture of their grandson burned on the disc. For casual writing, I'll still use a special felt pen. For high-value discs that I'm going to bother to make a custom jewel case jacket for, I'm definitely looking to Lightscribe as my on-disc labelling solution.
If you have any serious interest in selling software as a lone coder, pop for the $100 membership and join the ASP. In the members-only newsgroup there, you can pose this question (and many others you'll have along the way to profitability) to the hundreds of one-man shops that are making everything from modest riches to an OK living to some extra beer money.
Patents are certainly a bigger problem than they use to be. However, it's still somewhat rare that a patent puts an ASP member out of the market. Sometimes a payment deal is struck. Probably the most common event is that people get "patent fishing" letters from IP law firms who send out lots of "you might be violating our patent" letters in the hopes of reeling in some payments. The reason is, it's often hard to prove you're really violating a patent without a look at your source.
But this is just one of many issues you'll face as a shareware developer (I use "shareware" to simply mean the "try-before-you-buy" marketing scheme that almost all independent developers who sell to the public use). If you're serious, do yourself a favor and join the ASP so you can avoid a lot of costly mistakes.
We used to use a Sony Mavica to take pictures on floppy disks. That made for a stack of floppies after a week or two of vacation, but not unmanageable. Then, technology gave us a Sony camera that could record on optical disc. Woohoo! Instead of a stack of floppies, one disc (or 2 at worst) could cover an entire vacation.
When we lost a floppy disk, we only lost 20 pictures at most. Alas, when we lost an optical disc, we lost an entire vacation's worth of pictures.
When media data storage rates double, reliability needs to double too!
Slashdot Mirror
Then you are unfamiliar with the business of writing and how most professional writers work.
* You could compare it to programming.
I could. In programming, one also finds that things like security must be done in a separate pass to be done well. That's why folks who try to just spit out secure code end up with things like Windows, while folks who do separate security audit passes have a much better track record of achieving their goal.
First, do the writing: get all your ideas down as fast as you can without worrying about structure, or complete sentences or anything except putting everything down that you can think of.
Second, do the editing. Now look at your big pile of ideas and think about what the right order for things is, how to start and finish it, what to throw out, what things go best together, and eventually even sentence-level details like grammar.
8 times out of 10 when I have an engineer staring at two sentences on an otherwise blank screen, it's because they think it has to spool out onto the page in linear, perfected form right from the start.
That's why I added the comment about how it looks from above, since it's not clear any two people would agree on what rotating "outward" might mean. It's hard to describe body movement in text, but I'll try again.
First, sit down. Second, bend your arms so that your elbows are at your side, and your palms are in front of your face, kinda like you're holding an imaginary book. Next, clench palms into fist. Now rotate your fists as far as they will go.
Which direction to rotate the fists? Well you can see the "view from above" description again. Another way to put it is that your pinky fingers twist towards your body, not away from your body. Again, from above (looking down from the ceiling), that will look like the right fist is rotating counter-clockwise, and the left fist is rotating clockwise.
Hold the stretch for 10-15 seconds.
I usually do the stretch at the first sign of soreness, then repeat the stretch (only takes 15 seconds after all) every 20-30 minutes thereafter until I don't have a problem any more (I usually just forget to stop stretching shortly after I don't have any more soreness :-).
I hope this description is clearer.
You basically hold your hands up in front of you, palms facing you. Then make a tight fist, and rotate each fist to the outside as far as it will go. Fists will tend to pull downward, which is fine. (Looking from above, the right fist rotates counter clockwise while the left first rotates clockwise.) Hold the stretch for about 10-15 seconds. For me, this has been the absolute cheapest, simplest, and laziest way to deal with RSI from typing.
Geez, I know I don't pay for a subscription, and I know SlashDot doesn't claim to be any kind of professional writing at all, but...
When your website's one-and-only purpose for existing is to communicate information, don't you think it's worth at least minor efforts to avoid miscommunication like this?
It's really not that hard, either. You could probably find a highly qualified copyeditor or three who could do such small piece-work on demand from home for a very modest fee. Or, if you have zero budget for improving quality, simply having each non-professional writer require a careful reading of their piece from one or two of the other non-professional writers there before posting ought to prevent complete garbage like this sentence from making it in.
Please consider doing something to improve your process. Some mistakes are funny, but total opacity is not so entertaining.
Just be sure you also examined the source (all umpteen megs of it) for your compiler and all other tools (e.g. linker) you'll be using in the process, since it is an ancient and classic hack to simply infect a compiler to always include generated malware, and then throw away the hacked source to the compiler so that everyone thinks it's hunky dory. Not as simple as you thought, huh?
Website designers like this are also clueless about the needs of they people who pay for website design. There is really no point in jumping through tons of hoops with cluttered codes just to get three columns that still don't quite work right in all conditions when you can just use an HTML table to do the same thing in 1/10th the complexity.
They generally still end up doing a miserable job at separating presentation from content.
The only good way to make websites that have to be maintained is to generate the websites. That way, you can use tables, CSS, whatever-you-like, and know that you can change your mind site-wide just by changing the generating code.
You came to expose one myth and reinforce another, it seems. That "proper timecode" idea is based on the incorrect assumption that the bits you layed down during the "blank record" will hit the record head in exactly the same spot when you later do your "real" record. Ain't gonna happen. Tapes sag and stretch, and only a minute amount of same is required to put those timecode bits in the wrong spot. By the time you're 30 minutes of tape into it, that original timecode just ain't gonna be in sync with what you're recording now.
How about this instead: "pack" your blank tape by first fast-forwarding and then rewinding. If the manufacturer accidentally left a spot that was not firmly rewound, this *might* fix that. Then record about 30 seconds of blank tape (most tape damage allegedly occurs at the front, so you don't want your precious video to start there).
Finally, the real rule on the timecode problem: Always start a new record by backing up a bit from the last one. This is a problem when you record in several pieces with some video reviewing in-between, not really a problem if you're just recording from start to finish in one sitting. If you know you're going to stop recording and review, just put the lens cap on and record an extra 10 seconds trailer. Be sure to position the tape into that trailer before you start recording again. That'll keep you from having messed-up timecodes.
I never have dropouts.
Maybe. Or maybe you just have software/hardware that can't or won't inform you of dropouts. Maybe you're getting dropped frames here and there all the time and you just never know the difference.
Time to dig out once again my copy of the original paper on Hungarian notation in which Simonyi clearly says it's designed to *not* be mnemonic, that it's better to have unintelligible variable names. In later revisionist papers, he backs off of that -- the notation itself is still it's good old unintelligible anti-mnemonic self, though.
Cancer is not rare at all, as we know from autopsies conducted on car crash victims. For example, if you are over 50, there's a high probability that you have thyroid cancer -- it's just that the thyroid tumor is sitting there, not growing, and probably never would grow (we know that from the rates of how many people actually develop symptoms of thyroid cancer). This is the point of the anti-angiogenic approach to attacking cancer: the difference between tumors that just sit there and tumors that grow to kill people is their ability to grow new blood vessels to feed themselves. Prevent the formation of new blood vessels, and you don't prevent cancer, but you prevent death from cancer.
Sigh. It's always so frustrating trying to make heads or tales out of news accounts of medical research.
It is interesting the paper generally downplays the importance of angiogenesis in tumor growth. Yet I could not immediately see how their theory could otherwise explain the large number of cancer tumors we know are harmless, precisely because they cannot grow blood vessels. I chuckle a bit at their comment that factors such as angiogenesis may influence growth merely by "allowing it or not". Pardon me if my immediate inclination is to reach for the on/off switch rather than fractal math!
Me, I write in XML. Any kind of XML I want. Any XML structure that best fits the type of document I'm working on. I've got XSLT to transform it into {really old HTML; HTML 4.0 strict; XHTML + CSS; whatever the boss wants tomorrow}.
Does adding that XSLT translation layer have to cost a lot? C'mon, we're programmers -- it really doesn't have to be a big deal unless it has to. For example, if you've got basically static pages, then you can just use make to automatically regenerate the .html page when its .xml source changes.
If you think you're separating content from presentation via CSS, you should try your hand at Plain Old XML for content, with XSLT to insulate you utterly/completely/totally from the presentation. (OK, I confess: tables still tend to be tables, and I have no shame about naming my tags table/tr/td when the custom equivalent really introduces no particular new semantic value.)
What does that mean? At the highest level, it means that most of the Google algorithm is constructed by a machine. You give the machine human-constructed examples of how to rank a sample set of pages (notice those want ads where Google is hiring people who can inspect and assess the quality of web pages?) and it then uses essentially brute-force techniques to test every possible combination of your ranking variables to find the simplest formula that ranks pages the same way the human did.
There is no human at Google "twisting dials" to alter individual parameters of a formula. The machine constructs the algorithm, and it can therefore easily be so complex that no human can understand it. Tweaking the algorithm becomes a process of changing or adding to your "training set" of human-ranked pages, and letting the data mining process come up with a revised algorithm.
For example, Google could invent a new variable called "category", and identify each page as belonging to category Astronomy, Botulism, Country, [...] and Other. Once that variable is thrown into the mix, then the Google "aglorithm" is essentially free to vary wildly from one type of subject matter to the next. For example, you might see someone with a Real Estate site swearing up and down that inbound links are no longer as important, while someone with an Astronomy site might swear that, no, inbound links are more important than ever. You can see exactly this kind of bickering in most of the forums that people who hope to do Search Engine Optimization frequent.
The other big mistake people make in trying to see how to game the Google algorithm is "delay". In studying how people manage (or fail to manage) complex systems, psychologists learned that people generally would fail if a delay was introduced between their actions and the results of their actions.
In one very simple test, people were charged with trying to stabilize the temperature in a virtual refridgerator. They had one dial, and there was exactly one piece of feedback: the current temperature in the fridge. However, they were not explicitly told that there was a delay between moving the dial and when the results of that action would stabilize.
The responses of those test subjects was eerily similar to what we see in Google-gaming webmasters these days. Some people swore up and down that some human behind the scenes was directly tweaking the results to thwart whatever they did. Others became frustrated and decided that nothing they did really mattered, so they would just swing the dial back and forth between its minimum and maximum settings.
What does this have to do with Google? These days, Google can change their algorithm relatively frequently, and the algorithm can vary by the relative date of various things. The net sum is, there's a delay between when your page is first ranked and when it is likely to arrive at a relatively stable ranking. This can drive webmasters nuts as they think they've done something clever to rank their page high, but then it drops a week later. Although it doesn't occur to them, the important question is: did the change cause the high ranking or did it cause the sudden decline?
The few people who did master the simple refridgerator system? Well, they sounded more like some of the people who are more successful at gaming Google. Those folks tend to say things like: "just make one change and then leave it alone for a while to see what happens."
Can you still game the Google algorithm? Undoubtedly in specific cases. But it's getting harder. The Google algorithm was always complex, but what's changing is that the days when a few variables (such as inbound link count) generally swamped the effects of all the others is drawing to a close. We are approaching the day when the best technique to rank highly with Google will be: sit down at your keyboard and make more good content every day.
Image backups certainly have their place for people who can understand their limitations. However, a good, automatic, versioning file backup is almost certainly a higher priority for most computer users. And under some circumstances, they might also want to go with RAID for home computers.
Once there was an interface standard that supported the basic "something that looks like a disk drive" concept, the war was essentially over. Who cares if different people choose flash, or miniature disk, or anything else that might come along? So long as they can all plug into that USB port and behave pretty much the same to your host computer's software, there's no reason to mind that a single removable media format is not king.
What's left for the USB media revolution is its use in bricks and mortar commerce. In the B&M scene, they are constantly trying to create schemes to get you to carry a device (e.g., smartcards) to let them "touch" your data. The information benefits for the B&M store are clear, and the example of store cards ("10% off if you have your QFC card!") shows that they can offer rewards to induce the information sharing.
But who wants to carry 15 different magstripe cards for 15 different stores? The answer is in those little USB devices that more and more people have in their pocket. What's needed is an open standard for sharing data on a USB device -- a standard that lets the customer control what the merchant can store on the card, and what information the customer is willing to share with that merchant.
Consider the following scenario. I walk into a store I've never visited before. They tell me that if I sign up for an "affinity card", I'll get 30% off today's purchase. But now, instead of spending 15 minutes filling out a lengthy form of personal information, I just plug in my disk on key. Up comes a list of personal profiles I've created. I pick the one I'm willing to share with the store, select how much device storage I'm willing to let the store have on my USB device, punch a button, and I'm done!. When I return that store, I can just plug my pocket USB device into their socket to qualify for discounts.
You can already purchase password database applications designed to run from USB disks. These let you walk up to your Internet cafe machine, plug in your USB disk, and gain access to all your many encrypted passwords for logging into various web sites. There's no reason the same sort of thing can't be extended to "logging in" to B&M stores.
You can also view this as the typical Microsoft "why don't you partner with us since we don't want to do that -- oh my, look at how much money you're making -- sorry, we have to crush you know". In this case, the hapless partner is Veritas. Last time I talked to someone there, the slightly nervous attitude on Microsoft's threatened rollout was essentially a hope that customers will not really want to trust their data to a Microsoft product.
They may be right. It's certainly somewhat unusual for someone to roll out a big public beta of a backup product -- people generally want to get the feeling that their backup software is free of data-losing bugs at v1.0, not have to wonder if all the 567 bugs reported in the beta period really got fixed and fixed correctly.
If the Microsoft DPM product actually ships, I'm sure Veritas will have some sleepness nights waiting to see if it takes some of their market share. And probably a few more sleepness nights waiting to see if Longhorn will provide some undocumented hooks to Microsoft's product that gives it an edge in doing things like hot backups of particular kinds of data Windows uses.
There seems to be some confusion about hot backup in this thread. Basically, you cannot do a hot backup of an entire disk that maintains integrity without the cooperation of any software that might be running. There's just no way backup software can magically intuit that third-party software is in the midst of a logically atomic operation that required multiple writes to the disk.
Database software that uses transaction protection (which is a minority of all databases on the planet) can, of course, recover integrity even in the face of a backup that does not coordinate operations with it. But the kind of people who would buy Microsoft DPM would probably be running a database that comes with its own hot backup solution.
But the big news here is simply that disk-to-disk backup cannot get more mainstream at this point. It's rapidly gone from a kind of novelty alternative to tape in certain situations to hot new product to so-boring-that-now-even-Microsoft-does-it. There's no shortage of tape installations that will persist because they are simply good enough, but it's getting tougher to find enterprises that are planning a big investment in a new tape backup system.
Consider how many copies of MySQL are running on IDE disks. Do any IDE disks in common use actually support a reliable "tell me when this data is flushed to the magnetic media" operation? It certainly appears that Microsoft doesn't think so. Therefore, I speculate that few, if any people who switched from MySql to PostgreSQL because of WAL actually understood the likelihood of data loss that remained.
The hot-linked phrase "scheduled launch for STS-114" took me to a page that nowhere claims that May 15th is the scheduled launch date. Now I am left to wonder whether "Zonk" really found a declared launch date, or just confused the first day of the launch window (which does start on May 15th) with an actual statement that NASA is now targeting that specific day.
Whether or not pages were published specifically for the purpose of showing ads is a total judgement call. This is much like the IRS rules for determining whether someone is a contractor or an employee. The final rule at the bottom of the list is essentially: "and if, after all that, we still think you look like an employee, then you're an employee."
There will always be multiple backup solutions, but the biggest trend continues to be towards using hard disks for backup. When your data files are enormous (such as with audio/visual data), HDD backup is even more attractive.
- Immediately(!) purchase the stolen software, using a Mastercard or Visa. The resulting download is evidence, and the purchase itself will be used later. Make every effort to identify who (URL, domain name, contact info, company name, etc.) is actually processing this credit card transaction (hint: it's usually not the kid in Pakistan).
- Notify the contact info of the domain of the infringement. Use a DMCA-compliant notification.
- Notify the next upstream ISP of that domain of same.
- Notify the domain's registrar. Some have TOS which forbid illegal activity.
- Is the bad guy still up? Then start notifying the credit card processor that they have participated in a sale of stolen goods. Use a letter that calmly documents the date of purchase, how you identified the download as a stolen copy of your software, etc.
- When your credit card bill arrives, follow the instructions on the back of the bill to contest that purchase. Inform the credit card company of everything that's happened, including dates and times and copies of correspondence
- Join the ASP. It's a chance to notify fellow software producers that their software is being ripped off along with yours (and increase the pressure on a particular pirate site). It's also a way of supporting an organization that works to support your right to make a living selling software.
The linchpin in this effort is credit card processing. I don't care if you live on a small island that you rule yourself, if you take Mastercard/Visa transactions, you rely on American companies and American law. These giant companies grant smaller companies the right to parcel out merchant accounts, and they can cause non-trivial financial pain for merchant accounts that generate too many complaints for them.The wheels of the law can take much time to grind to a conclusion, and not always in your favor. Visa/Mastercard can issue a $20,000 fine in a much shorter time, and they don't have to consult a jury.
In the Wild West of Internet fraud that involves money flow, Mastercard/Visa is judge, jury, and executioner. Most victims simply don't know enough to bring their case to them, or the amount of fraud would be dropping.
When posting a link to www.forbes.com articles, please note that you have to have cookies (or is it ActiveX and cookies) enabled in order to read it. All I get when I follow the posted link is an infinite loop of "skip this welcome screen", and then when I click on that, a page that redirects right back to the welcome screen (which really just shows an empty box, since I have ActiveX disabled).
The need to purchase special media is actually a plus in my book. AFAIK, this will be the first labelling solution for optical discs that was actually designed by people who have to make optical discs work correctly. No spin imbalance due to "painting" on only parts of the disc, no chemicals leaching through to the other side, etc. If I can make a lovely graphical label without worrying that it will decrease the odds the disc will be readable in 5 years, that will likely be worth a modest price penalty in media to me. At this point, there is still no word on what the price penalty will actually be for a drive or for the media.
The real disadvantages are: quite slow to burn (think 20 minutes for a complex graphic) that high-res image, and only monochrome. So, if you sell software, don't think this is going to be a neat way of producing labels for shipped product.
What it will be really cool for is things like handing a home movie DVD to your inlaws with a picture of their grandson burned on the disc. For casual writing, I'll still use a special felt pen. For high-value discs that I'm going to bother to make a custom jewel case jacket for, I'm definitely looking to Lightscribe as my on-disc labelling solution.
Patents are certainly a bigger problem than they use to be. However, it's still somewhat rare that a patent puts an ASP member out of the market. Sometimes a payment deal is struck. Probably the most common event is that people get "patent fishing" letters from IP law firms who send out lots of "you might be violating our patent" letters in the hopes of reeling in some payments. The reason is, it's often hard to prove you're really violating a patent without a look at your source.
But this is just one of many issues you'll face as a shareware developer (I use "shareware" to simply mean the "try-before-you-buy" marketing scheme that almost all independent developers who sell to the public use). If you're serious, do yourself a favor and join the ASP so you can avoid a lot of costly mistakes.
When we lost a floppy disk, we only lost 20 pictures at most. Alas, when we lost an optical disc, we lost an entire vacation's worth of pictures.
When media data storage rates double, reliability needs to double too!