A bug is not "fixed" until it is fixed and it is been through enough testing to have a high degree of confidence that unwanted side effects have not occurred. Access to a development version doesn't tell me that it has been fixed, even if I go download it and run it through random tests myself for hours. A full regression test suite on a product like this takes a test farm many hours to run in Microsoft's case or in Mozilla's case, I suppose the substitute would be just making it through a few months of being run by the more hardcore users with no complaints.
To compare the release of a fix for a Mozilla bug in a nightly build of the development trunk to the release of an Explorer patch is an apples and oranges comparison at the least. Post the story when the Mozilla bug fix has been run through a complete test cycle and appears in a stable release. Put another way, if Mozilla had a system designed to drive the fix out to every user including the secretaries and the grandmothers in the nursing home (maybe it has, I don't know), you might have a story if they drove their fix out before Microsoft drives theirs out. To know whether the comparison made today means anything, you'd have to know whether Microsoft has fixed this in their internal nightly builds.
Pertinent info from http://www.msnbc.com/news/916323.asp
Adding to the industry's employment woes is news that big investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are reportedly considering farming more of their jobs overseas to countries like India, where employment costs are significantly cheaper.
According to a recent study by management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, U.S. mutual funds, banks, brokerages and insurers plan to move 500,000 jobs overseas, or about 8 percent of their workforces, overseas over the next five years, saving some $30 billion annually in operating costs.
The job relocations will begin to involve increasingly sophisticated positions, including financial analysis, research, accounting and human resources, A.T. Kearney finds. Until now, offshore job transfers have focused on back-office functions such as data entry.
Nope. There is no requirement for citizenship or residence and those with enough money can pay to have certification exams administered remotely. So, individuals can in fact get certifications for countries/states in which they don't live, especially with the backing and help of highly motivated (by dollar signs) corporations. I will try to find a link to the news story, but there was a story this past week about both major corporations and Wall Street firms moving financial work oversees, especially to India. They were moving both corporate book keeping and analysts.
like many of the others in the high tech bust. The most threatening thing to the American high tech economy at this time is continuing economic globalization. Interestingly, this trend is now expanding to threaten other agendas that require higher education. Just this week I heard that CPAs are now losing jobs to India because the average college trained CPA in India makes $6000 per year.
Why have we become so vulnerable to foreign competition? In my opinion, it is due to the way that we have commoditized and dumbed down our higher education process. We've concentrated on creating a manufacturing line like education process to turn out droves of programming/financial/engineering/etc robots. OF COURSE THIS CAN BE COPIED!!!
The education process used to turn out thinkers who, instead of being brainwashed in the current mantra de jeur, solved problems without a toolbox full of fix-alls that never quite fit the problem. In creating the mass manufacturing style education system, we've neglected the necessity to continue to produce the thinkers.
A step back in volume might be a good thing to allow some of the education to return to a more renaissance approach.
Long term, if we hope to maintain our lead and not spiral into deflation across all sorts of technical areas, we need to look toward an education system that adequately provides for both types. The current prevailing CS curriculum is more of a tech school approach to education and should be moved to the tech schools. Then the colleges need to return to teaching the best of the best who have the special abilities needed to develop the technologies to keep us from being commodotized down to $6000 / year salaries. And their education should not be full of mantras but instead concentrate on teaching basic facts (instead of beliefs like OOP, structured programming, etc), and approaches to analyzing and solving problems in a manner that fits the problem, not the tools.
You're not in college to learn how to think. You're there to lose all of that wasteful morality and learn how to be a good little consumer in this brave new world.
The answer to that could make all the difference. Getting into programming in some ways has become like getting into med school. Someone with 10 years engineering, legal or software experience has a better chance of getting into med school because of the possibilities of the combination of talents. I think the same is true of programming. If you can find a hot niche market that your combination of talents uniquely suits you too, you've got a better sale.
For example, in about 3 years linguistic specialists with programming talents will likely be in high demand as speech recognition becomes a desirable interface in more and more specialized apps. That generation of speech recognition is going to require a lot of linguistic knowledge and programming instinct to train.
Re:If every space flight was guaranteed not to ret
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Shuttle Politics
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No, I'm not being glib. I can think of quite a few lesser things that I'd give my life for. I've only briefly spoken with any astronauts, but I've talked to a few test pilots who were deciding whether or not products were ready for first flight and, though careful, they saw it as their job to take measured risks. I'd say the ratio of the risk to reward was much greater in their case than what an astronaut takes.
One chance in 50 of blowing up against the reward of actually going in to space is a much smaller risk to reward ratio than many people take. For example, what's the risk to reward ratio of skydiving? I think I've read that the risk is about one chance in 3000 of dying and that is placed against the reward of falling a few thousand feet. I'd say going to space is worth more than 60 sky diving trips, so going to space is less risky per unit of reward. All I'm saying is that the value of actually standing on Mars to many people would be greater than the value of returning.
The value of life is simply not measured in years lived. That measurement is nearly worthless. A more proper measurement would total the quality of the life per unit time over that time. A few months being the first on Mars would total greater than many years being one of a few billion ants on Earth for many people.
Frankly, if our space program isn't full of people who'd rather spend the last three months of their life as the first on Mars now than spend the next 40 years on Earth, then we've got the wrong people in the space program.
This is no different then those who would die for their spouse, their children, their country, or any of countless dreams. And though it wouldn't be moral to encourage them, I'd go as far as to say that once they've made the judgement as to which life is the greater one to them, it would be immoral to oppose their pursuit of that greater life just to impose your belief that the longer life would be greater.
If every space flight was guaranteed not to return
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
you'd still have no troubles finding astronauts to fly them, though you might want to make sure they are more important than those we've taken lately. We seem to have totally lost our sense of the value of exploration as well as our sense of freedom.
Those that go up aren't doing so blindly. They've made their choice as to the relative value of their lives to themselves without going versus the value to themselves of going. We should honor that choice by being proud of them for being braver than most, not by denying the choice to others.
If someone were to come up with a plan for a one way trip to Mars that offered even a glimmer of hope for surviving, you'd have no trouble finding people who would rather live a few months on Mars than the rest of their lives on Earth. Time by itself isn't a reason to live.
I pointed that out a while back. Furthermore, the industry has shown signs that they can push it to 9 when they want to.
I've also pointed out that the capacity will be easily used. First you'll want to record a full time video stream. Then multiples so that you can record the lives of your family and everything that occurs in multiple locations you own. The real hit comes when you start recording it in 3D and in enough resolution that you can later zoom on anything that was around you at any point in time during the day, whether or not you were looking in that direction. The high amplification 3D sound recording made using the directional sensors woven into your clothes will suck up quite a bit too.
Of course, to usefully index it, you would need to be able to recognize objects and people within that spherical 3D video stream in real time. Otherwise, the command to isolate (both visually and auditorally) and play back the conversation between the two people in red shirts talking behind your back about 10 minutes ago won't be understood.
Like it or not, open source writers are part of a software community that includes Microsoft. If Microsoft loses a case like this, there is no reason why someone couldn't bring a suit against open source writers who "put bugs" in the software they write as well as all of the open source community (most are easily traceable) who didn't catch the bugs. Of course, not being Microsoft, we'd pretty much have to throw up our hands, scream uncle, and pay since it takes money to win one of these cases. Let's hope the world stays focused on Microsoft and the other biggies and stays away from the small fry.
Actually, there's another point there in that the way you win one of these big cases is to first build precedence against those who can't afford to defend themselves. If some consortium of law firms in the US were to decide to take a real attack at Microsoft, they would first prepare the ground by attacking those who can't defend themselves for a couple of years.
So, whose going to develop the means to use cvs while masquerading who you are?
Its really the simple games that get me the most. To really play minesweeper well, you have to commit complex patterns to instinct and then defocus your eyes a little so that you see and comprehend all of the field at one time. Then you sort of make your world one with the field and shut out everything else. After a few hours of minesweeper, I'm a very dangerous driver because turning off that pattern matching logic is difficult. I tend to find myself instinctively relating the cars to the cells of the field and wondering which are the bombs.
I agree from what I've experienced and read that the old C++ support is a little raw. But, I'm not sure why anyone would bother writing in that. The VB and C# support seems to be more robust and there are other syntaxes to work with too (I think its very appropriate to emphasize syntax in the VS7 world because semantics are largely ruled by the framework). If you prefer Java, that's available. I personally think Perl.Net is pretty cool.
With most any product you'll generally find that understanding what is the primary design emphasis or most beaten path in the product and following it will give you the richest experience.
I feel sure that C++ support will catch up as long as there is reasonable demand for it.
I'm aware of the issues with polygraphs, but as posted elsewhere the conditions and objectives are different here in a way that changes the equation. In this case, I have a 100% accurate test to put in a feedback loop with the polygraph. Basically, if I can get a password that works, my objective has been met and the polygraph worked with 100% certain accuracy. So, even if it only works with 1 person in 10, its value is not significantly reduced. It still made an attack possible for that one person that might have been impossible otherwise. Furthermore, even with that one person, I don't have to get everything right, just a significant reduction in the search space could help. If I can knock 3 characters off of a 10 character password or even just determine with a high degree of certainty that its a 10 character password, I've done something useful. Heck, if you've watched wheel of fortune enough, 3 might be all you need to allow the old ultimate computer to solve it in seconds.
I think the difference in this case is that the proof is in whether or not the password works. If the password works, you've met your goal which was to be able to get into the user's machine and decode the message using the keys there (and perhaps another password). The password itself doesn't have to be admissable in court.
Also, I suppose I wasn't thinking of a normal polygraph. I was thinking of a device that I played with 17 years ago where you could put a set of electrodes on your head and move a cursor around. The device could also fairly reliably detect whether you were conscious or not (that was actually its purpose). We also discovered that we could detect "recognition". For example, we'd go through a phase of tuning it to the user. Then we'd get the user thinking about a certain object and show a bunch of pictures. Recognizable signal changes occurred when the object you got them to think about was shown to them. Its this ability to detect "recognition" that I think could be utilized here.
For most users with fairly weak passwords anyway, I'd doubt that you'd have to be correct on every character of the password. If you got a few of them, there's likely a recognizable pattern or word that will fill in the blanks.
In short, its because the effectiveness of the method doesn't have to be 100%, just a correct attack on a few of the characters and recognition of which ones its unsure on might do, and because I don't think admissability in court matters one bit that I think you could do it.
Securing 802.11 is trivial
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I don't understand why everyone has trouble with it. Stand up a VPN node accepting nothing but your favorite secure VPN protocol (IPSec is fine) on one card and putting your company network on the other. You then connect put your 802.11 routers on the VPN card and configure your 802.11 routers to allow the VPN protocol. You're now secure. Perhaps a DOS attack could make your 802.11 useless (plug an unshielded magnetron into an outlet in the building for example), but your data can't be compromised through it.
They probably got the keys from the users
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2002 US Wiretap Report
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10 to 1, they either found other evidence to force the users to voluntarily cough up the keys, got a warrant to put a sniffer on the user's keyboard in the case of computer communications and then retrieved the keys from the computer after they got the password, or they physically copied the encryption keys out of the phones in the case of encrypting phones.
I've always wondered if they can get a password from you involuntarily by just hooking you up to a lie detector and asking questions like, "is the first letter a vowel? Is it 'A'? Is it 'E'? Is the second letter a number?... etc.
Anyway, most encryption is pretty useless if the cracker can own the machine or its keyboard for a while without the user's knowledge and almost all of it is useless if you own the user.
By naming their new framework.Net and focusing marketing on XML, MS has taken advantage of the hype that everyone's eyes are currently on to produce a radically improved API. I'd say
The truth is that Visual Studio 7 is the most comprehensively advanced programming environment I've ever seen and it easily supports a 10 fold increase in programmer productivity versus VS97 due to the quadruple whammy of what I see as Microsoft's first truly pro editing environment, a near complete elimination of language wars by forcing all to be equal in capability and to share objects, a far more comprehensive and easy to use object oriented API than Win32, and the end of the registry and associated DLL hell.
While everyone's watching the bouncing hype ball, 95% of what's good in the framework has been ignored. I believe this is Microsoft's intent.
Where will they go? In two to three years I think we'll start hearing about an OS release that has a CLR interpreter that doesn't run on Win32, but has everything needed natively present to run directly on a kernel. Suddenly, all of the.Net code will be vastly faster and Win32 will be scheduled for deprecation..Net has nothing to do with the net or with XML, it has to do with replacing the Win32 framework with a new framework. For now, its a framework running on a framework and will thus be slow. Eventually, it will be THE framework doing nothing except what IT needs to do and will cook.
As much as they seem to gripe and make noise about other.Net framework implementation efforts, I think they are really hoping that its done and everyone converts to it. A.Net application running on top of a.Net framework running on top of any of Win32, Linux, or OSX will never be as fast as a.Net application running on a.Net OS. If done with enough slight of hand, its a perfect recipe for a complete coup.
Actually, this could be a major breakthrough
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Reading Lips In Software
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in speech recognition if it does no more than allow input from a camera to aid in separating out which sounds came from which speakers. Simply fixing the background noise problem would be a huge advance.
to determine the business addresses that those who actually respond to his spam would be sending their checks too and swamp those? Spammers depend on a very low operational cost model to make money. If they have to sort through 100s of items of mail for every one that has a check in it, you've just increased their cost of doing business.
If they're doing most of their business electronically, publishing a list of their SSL sites could be interesting. If we all ran something to walk the list once an hour and just make a connection to the SSL sites and leave it, they'd be effectively down. Negotiating the SSL connections has a high computing cost on their side.
If someone were to design a virus that does that and continuously checks into sites for new lists, I might actually try to get the virus.
In other words, if you want to have a real effect, go for cutting off the money.
Actually, my cholesterol has dropped from 280 to 210 and my tryglycerides have dropped from over 500 to under 300. And I feel better than I have in years, though I'm still overweight. The feeling good part started very quickly after dropping the carbs. And if I ever cheat and eat carbs, the feeling bad comes back within an hour and stays for a day or so. I've heard this experience echoed by most everyone that uses this diet.
I've been steadily losing weight eating 2 eggs/2 pieces of bacon/bread in the morning, lettuce and 3 chicken breasts for lunch, and a 2 pound porterhouse every night. It is definitely not a low cal diet.
I just go into the store, set the store's computer to 1600x1200 resolution at at least 72Hz, and, using a magnifying glass, look for the monitor that has no fuzziness on the dots of the colon in the time in the corner. I've found that many monitors claim 1600x1200 resolution, but very few pass this test (and thus, as far as I'm concerned they are lying about their resolution). It seems that the horizontal dot pitch has to be about 0.22 or below to pass. Apparently, the resolution specification is based on the electronics, not the mask.
When the monitor passes this test, I find working my normal 12 hour days at 1600x1200 in small fonts is not tiring to the eyes. The sharpness of the text is far more important than the size. Fuzzy text at just about any size is tiring.
The very same monitors tend to play 3D games very nicely at 2048x1536. Games don't require the sharpness that text does and in fact, I think they benefit some from some fuzziness (probably in the same way that photographs benefit from printing with dye sublimation instead of inkjets).
I'll give you perfect geometry though the majority of people perceive perfect geometry as concave. A slightly convex geometry is actually a better presentation for human perception because it adjusts to the fact that the edges and corners are further from your eyes than the center. If they can get to the point of creating these displays so that they are flexible, they could achieve the ultimate of a display that adjusts itself to be the same distance from your eyes no matter what point of the display you turn your head to look at.
Perfect focus is only true if you run it at a perfect multiple of its natural resolution. I rarely see them run at that. Otherwise, interpolation has to be done which arguably isn't out of focus, but has the same smearing effect.
I don't care about hear output. Its never been an issue for me despite working in a small room.
The reduction in desktop space per dollar spent is not greater than the cost of the desktop space.
And I really like strong desks. Woodworking is something I'm working on developing as a means of taking a break from programming. I'm currently planning a much bigger desk to easily accomodate more monitors and computers.
In addition, from a simple cost per pixel and cost per square inch of presentation area, CRTs still blow away LCDs. LCDs are also still far behind in ability to correct color presentation and present colors accurately across the entire surface area of the display.
So, all in all, I think it a promising technology for the future desktop/wall, and a perfect match for notebooks, but given all but the largest budgets, I'd still go for spending the same amount of money on multiple CRTs versus single LCDs. It makes all the difference in the world to me to be able to see several forms at once and plenty of vertical content on each when programming.
I thought the same thing until I realized that 90% of the monitors on the shelf were lying about their maximum resolution. The masks on most of them are not fine enough to support 1600x1200. You can see this by looking at the colon on the clock with a magnifying glass. If the edges of the dot are fuzzy at 1600x1200, the monitor doesn't support 1600x1200 resolution.
The first time I bought a 19", I took it back because of this. I then set the store's computer to 1600x1200 and went to each of the monitors with a magnifier and checked them out. I found 1 out of 12 that didn't lie about it's resolution. Interestingly, it was the next to the cheapest one and supported that resolution very nicely at 75Hz.
Since then, I've found the CRT's ease on the eyes and color correctness to be vastly better than the LCDs.
I've also noticed that the capabilities of the CRTs have been decreasing instead of increasing at an expected rate. Also, new CRT technologies that would vastly reduce the depth of the screens do not seem to be getting pursued. I believe the manufacturers to be sabotaging them to support the myth that the LCD's are easier on the eyes (they are if the CRTs aren't made right).
The way I see it, where everyone should have 3 or 4 times the display surface today for the same money they spent 5 years ago, instead, they are getting roped into a world of lesser pixels and smaller screens for more money. There must be a profit motive behind it, though all the manufacturer's still claim to be losing money on the LCDs. It all seems fishy.
Another point that I should have made somewhere in this article is that the optimum resolution for human vision of light emissive displays at arms length is supposedly around 300 DPI. Apparently, this is a little lower than optimum for printed results because its emissive instead of reflective. IBM has proven in studies that increasing DPI to 300DPI does more to rest the eyes than increasing vertical refresh rates. I read somewhere that Microsoft's operating systems now support up to 480 DPI. This change happened shortly after IBM's study and I believe was prompted by it. In short, we chased the wrong solution for eye strain for many years. Vertical refresh rate isn't near as big a player as resolution as long as the persistence of the pixels is properly matched to the refresh rate.
Slashdot Mirror
A bug is not "fixed" until it is fixed and it is been through enough testing to have a high degree of confidence that unwanted side effects have not occurred. Access to a development version doesn't tell me that it has been fixed, even if I go download it and run it through random tests myself for hours. A full regression test suite on a product like this takes a test farm many hours to run in Microsoft's case or in Mozilla's case, I suppose the substitute would be just making it through a few months of being run by the more hardcore users with no complaints.
To compare the release of a fix for a Mozilla bug in a nightly build of the development trunk to the release of an Explorer patch is an apples and oranges comparison at the least. Post the story when the Mozilla bug fix has been run through a complete test cycle and appears in a stable release. Put another way, if Mozilla had a system designed to drive the fix out to every user including the secretaries and the grandmothers in the nursing home (maybe it has, I don't know), you might have a story if they drove their fix out before Microsoft drives theirs out. To know whether the comparison made today means anything, you'd have to know whether Microsoft has fixed this in their internal nightly builds.
Adding to the industry's employment woes is news that big investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are reportedly considering farming more of their jobs overseas to countries like India, where employment costs are significantly cheaper.
According to a recent study by management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, U.S. mutual funds, banks, brokerages and insurers plan to move 500,000 jobs overseas, or about 8 percent of their workforces, overseas over the next five years, saving some $30 billion annually in operating costs.
The job relocations will begin to involve increasingly sophisticated positions, including financial analysis, research, accounting and human resources, A.T. Kearney finds. Until now, offshore job transfers have focused on back-office functions such as data entry.
Nope. There is no requirement for citizenship or residence and those with enough money can pay to have certification exams administered remotely. So, individuals can in fact get certifications for countries/states in which they don't live, especially with the backing and help of highly motivated (by dollar signs) corporations. I will try to find a link to the news story, but there was a story this past week about both major corporations and Wall Street firms moving financial work oversees, especially to India. They were moving both corporate book keeping and analysts.
like many of the others in the high tech bust. The most threatening thing to the American high tech economy at this time is continuing economic globalization. Interestingly, this trend is now expanding to threaten other agendas that require higher education. Just this week I heard that CPAs are now losing jobs to India because the average college trained CPA in India makes $6000 per year.
Why have we become so vulnerable to foreign competition? In my opinion, it is due to the way that we have commoditized and dumbed down our higher education process. We've concentrated on creating a manufacturing line like education process to turn out droves of programming/financial/engineering/etc robots. OF COURSE THIS CAN BE COPIED!!!
The education process used to turn out thinkers who, instead of being brainwashed in the current mantra de jeur, solved problems without a toolbox full of fix-alls that never quite fit the problem. In creating the mass manufacturing style education system, we've neglected the necessity to continue to produce the thinkers.
A step back in volume might be a good thing to allow some of the education to return to a more renaissance approach.
Long term, if we hope to maintain our lead and not spiral into deflation across all sorts of technical areas, we need to look toward an education system that adequately provides for both types. The current prevailing CS curriculum is more of a tech school approach to education and should be moved to the tech schools. Then the colleges need to return to teaching the best of the best who have the special abilities needed to develop the technologies to keep us from being commodotized down to $6000 / year salaries. And their education should not be full of mantras but instead concentrate on teaching basic facts (instead of beliefs like OOP, structured programming, etc), and approaches to analyzing and solving problems in a manner that fits the problem, not the tools.
You're not in college to learn how to think. You're there to lose all of that wasteful morality and learn how to be a good little consumer in this brave new world.
The answer to that could make all the difference. Getting into programming in some ways has become like getting into med school. Someone with 10 years engineering, legal or software experience has a better chance of getting into med school because of the possibilities of the combination of talents. I think the same is true of programming. If you can find a hot niche market that your combination of talents uniquely suits you too, you've got a better sale.
For example, in about 3 years linguistic specialists with programming talents will likely be in high demand as speech recognition becomes a desirable interface in more and more specialized apps. That generation of speech recognition is going to require a lot of linguistic knowledge and programming instinct to train.
No, I'm not being glib. I can think of quite a few lesser things that I'd give my life for. I've only briefly spoken with any astronauts, but I've talked to a few test pilots who were deciding whether or not products were ready for first flight and, though careful, they saw it as their job to take measured risks. I'd say the ratio of the risk to reward was much greater in their case than what an astronaut takes.
One chance in 50 of blowing up against the reward of actually going in to space is a much smaller risk to reward ratio than many people take. For example, what's the risk to reward ratio of skydiving? I think I've read that the risk is about one chance in 3000 of dying and that is placed against the reward of falling a few thousand feet. I'd say going to space is worth more than 60 sky diving trips, so going to space is less risky per unit of reward. All I'm saying is that the value of actually standing on Mars to many people would be greater than the value of returning.
The value of life is simply not measured in years lived. That measurement is nearly worthless. A more proper measurement would total the quality of the life per unit time over that time. A few months being the first on Mars would total greater than many years being one of a few billion ants on Earth for many people.
Frankly, if our space program isn't full of people who'd rather spend the last three months of their life as the first on Mars now than spend the next 40 years on Earth, then we've got the wrong people in the space program.
This is no different then those who would die for their spouse, their children, their country, or any of countless dreams. And though it wouldn't be moral to encourage them, I'd go as far as to say that once they've made the judgement as to which life is the greater one to them, it would be immoral to oppose their pursuit of that greater life just to impose your belief that the longer life would be greater.
Those that go up aren't doing so blindly. They've made their choice as to the relative value of their lives to themselves without going versus the value to themselves of going. We should honor that choice by being proud of them for being braver than most, not by denying the choice to others.
If someone were to come up with a plan for a one way trip to Mars that offered even a glimmer of hope for surviving, you'd have no trouble finding people who would rather live a few months on Mars than the rest of their lives on Earth. Time by itself isn't a reason to live.
I pointed that out a while back. Furthermore, the industry has shown signs that they can push it to 9 when they want to.
I've also pointed out that the capacity will be easily used. First you'll want to record a full time video stream. Then multiples so that you can record the lives of your family and everything that occurs in multiple locations you own. The real hit comes when you start recording it in 3D and in enough resolution that you can later zoom on anything that was around you at any point in time during the day, whether or not you were looking in that direction. The high amplification 3D sound recording made using the directional sensors woven into your clothes will suck up quite a bit too.
Of course, to usefully index it, you would need to be able to recognize objects and people within that spherical 3D video stream in real time. Otherwise, the command to isolate (both visually and auditorally) and play back the conversation between the two people in red shirts talking behind your back about 10 minutes ago won't be understood.
Like it or not, open source writers are part of a software community that includes Microsoft. If Microsoft loses a case like this, there is no reason why someone couldn't bring a suit against open source writers who "put bugs" in the software they write as well as all of the open source community (most are easily traceable) who didn't catch the bugs. Of course, not being Microsoft, we'd pretty much have to throw up our hands, scream uncle, and pay since it takes money to win one of these cases. Let's hope the world stays focused on Microsoft and the other biggies and stays away from the small fry.
Actually, there's another point there in that the way you win one of these big cases is to first build precedence against those who can't afford to defend themselves. If some consortium of law firms in the US were to decide to take a real attack at Microsoft, they would first prepare the ground by attacking those who can't defend themselves for a couple of years.
So, whose going to develop the means to use cvs while masquerading who you are?
Its really the simple games that get me the most. To really play minesweeper well, you have to commit complex patterns to instinct and then defocus your eyes a little so that you see and comprehend all of the field at one time. Then you sort of make your world one with the field and shut out everything else. After a few hours of minesweeper, I'm a very dangerous driver because turning off that pattern matching logic is difficult. I tend to find myself instinctively relating the cars to the cells of the field and wondering which are the bombs.
I agree from what I've experienced and read that the old C++ support is a little raw. But, I'm not sure why anyone would bother writing in that. The VB and C# support seems to be more robust and there are other syntaxes to work with too (I think its very appropriate to emphasize syntax in the VS7 world because semantics are largely ruled by the framework). If you prefer Java, that's available. I personally think Perl.Net is pretty cool.
With most any product you'll generally find that understanding what is the primary design emphasis or most beaten path in the product and following it will give you the richest experience.
I feel sure that C++ support will catch up as long as there is reasonable demand for it.
I'm aware of the issues with polygraphs, but as posted elsewhere the conditions and objectives are different here in a way that changes the equation. In this case, I have a 100% accurate test to put in a feedback loop with the polygraph. Basically, if I can get a password that works, my objective has been met and the polygraph worked with 100% certain accuracy. So, even if it only works with 1 person in 10, its value is not significantly reduced. It still made an attack possible for that one person that might have been impossible otherwise. Furthermore, even with that one person, I don't have to get everything right, just a significant reduction in the search space could help. If I can knock 3 characters off of a 10 character password or even just determine with a high degree of certainty that its a 10 character password, I've done something useful. Heck, if you've watched wheel of fortune enough, 3 might be all you need to allow the old ultimate computer to solve it in seconds.
I think the difference in this case is that the proof is in whether or not the password works. If the password works, you've met your goal which was to be able to get into the user's machine and decode the message using the keys there (and perhaps another password). The password itself doesn't have to be admissable in court.
Also, I suppose I wasn't thinking of a normal polygraph. I was thinking of a device that I played with 17 years ago where you could put a set of electrodes on your head and move a cursor around. The device could also fairly reliably detect whether you were conscious or not (that was actually its purpose). We also discovered that we could detect "recognition". For example, we'd go through a phase of tuning it to the user. Then we'd get the user thinking about a certain object and show a bunch of pictures. Recognizable signal changes occurred when the object you got them to think about was shown to them. Its this ability to detect "recognition" that I think could be utilized here.
For most users with fairly weak passwords anyway, I'd doubt that you'd have to be correct on every character of the password. If you got a few of them, there's likely a recognizable pattern or word that will fill in the blanks.
In short, its because the effectiveness of the method doesn't have to be 100%, just a correct attack on a few of the characters and recognition of which ones its unsure on might do, and because I don't think admissability in court matters one bit that I think you could do it.
I don't understand why everyone has trouble with it. Stand up a VPN node accepting nothing but your favorite secure VPN protocol (IPSec is fine) on one card and putting your company network on the other. You then connect put your 802.11 routers on the VPN card and configure your 802.11 routers to allow the VPN protocol. You're now secure. Perhaps a DOS attack could make your 802.11 useless (plug an unshielded magnetron into an outlet in the building for example), but your data can't be compromised through it.
10 to 1, they either found other evidence to force the users to voluntarily cough up the keys, got a warrant to put a sniffer on the user's keyboard in the case of computer communications and then retrieved the keys from the computer after they got the password, or they physically copied the encryption keys out of the phones in the case of encrypting phones.
I've always wondered if they can get a password from you involuntarily by just hooking you up to a lie detector and asking questions like, "is the first letter a vowel? Is it 'A'? Is it 'E'? Is the second letter a number?... etc.
Anyway, most encryption is pretty useless if the cracker can own the machine or its keyboard for a while without the user's knowledge and almost all of it is useless if you own the user.
By naming their new framework .Net and focusing marketing on XML, MS has taken advantage of the hype that everyone's eyes are currently on to produce a radically improved API. I'd say
The truth is that Visual Studio 7 is the most comprehensively advanced programming environment I've ever seen and it easily supports a 10 fold increase in programmer productivity versus VS97 due to the quadruple whammy of what I see as Microsoft's first truly pro editing environment, a near complete elimination of language wars by forcing all to be equal in capability and to share objects, a far more comprehensive and easy to use object oriented API than Win32, and the end of the registry and associated DLL hell.
While everyone's watching the bouncing hype ball, 95% of what's good in the framework has been ignored. I believe this is Microsoft's intent.
Where will they go? In two to three years I think we'll start hearing about an OS release that has a CLR interpreter that doesn't run on Win32, but has everything needed natively present to run directly on a kernel. Suddenly, all of the .Net code will be vastly faster and Win32 will be scheduled for deprecation. .Net has nothing to do with the net or with XML, it has to do with replacing the Win32 framework with a new framework. For now, its a framework running on a framework and will thus be slow. Eventually, it will be THE framework doing nothing except what IT needs to do and will cook.
As much as they seem to gripe and make noise about other .Net framework implementation efforts, I think they are really hoping that its done and everyone converts to it. A .Net application running on top of a .Net framework running on top of any of Win32, Linux, or OSX will never be as fast as a .Net application running on a .Net OS. If done with enough slight of hand, its a perfect recipe for a complete coup.
in speech recognition if it does no more than allow input from a camera to aid in separating out which sounds came from which speakers. Simply fixing the background noise problem would be a huge advance.
to determine the business addresses that those who actually respond to his spam would be sending their checks too and swamp those? Spammers depend on a very low operational cost model to make money. If they have to sort through 100s of items of mail for every one that has a check in it, you've just increased their cost of doing business.
If they're doing most of their business electronically, publishing a list of their SSL sites could be interesting. If we all ran something to walk the list once an hour and just make a connection to the SSL sites and leave it, they'd be effectively down. Negotiating the SSL connections has a high computing cost on their side.
If someone were to design a virus that does that and continuously checks into sites for new lists, I might actually try to get the virus.
In other words, if you want to have a real effect, go for cutting off the money.
Actually, my cholesterol has dropped from 280 to 210 and my tryglycerides have dropped from over 500 to under 300. And I feel better than I have in years, though I'm still overweight. The feeling good part started very quickly after dropping the carbs. And if I ever cheat and eat carbs, the feeling bad comes back within an hour and stays for a day or so. I've heard this experience echoed by most everyone that uses this diet.
I've been steadily losing weight eating 2 eggs/2 pieces of bacon/bread in the morning, lettuce and 3 chicken breasts for lunch, and a 2 pound porterhouse every night. It is definitely not a low cal diet.
I just go into the store, set the store's computer to 1600x1200 resolution at at least 72Hz, and, using a magnifying glass, look for the monitor that has no fuzziness on the dots of the colon in the time in the corner. I've found that many monitors claim 1600x1200 resolution, but very few pass this test (and thus, as far as I'm concerned they are lying about their resolution). It seems that the horizontal dot pitch has to be about 0.22 or below to pass. Apparently, the resolution specification is based on the electronics, not the mask.
When the monitor passes this test, I find working my normal 12 hour days at 1600x1200 in small fonts is not tiring to the eyes. The sharpness of the text is far more important than the size. Fuzzy text at just about any size is tiring.
The very same monitors tend to play 3D games very nicely at 2048x1536. Games don't require the sharpness that text does and in fact, I think they benefit some from some fuzziness (probably in the same way that photographs benefit from printing with dye sublimation instead of inkjets).
I'll give you perfect geometry though the majority of people perceive perfect geometry as concave. A slightly convex geometry is actually a better presentation for human perception because it adjusts to the fact that the edges and corners are further from your eyes than the center. If they can get to the point of creating these displays so that they are flexible, they could achieve the ultimate of a display that adjusts itself to be the same distance from your eyes no matter what point of the display you turn your head to look at.
Perfect focus is only true if you run it at a perfect multiple of its natural resolution. I rarely see them run at that. Otherwise, interpolation has to be done which arguably isn't out of focus, but has the same smearing effect.
I don't care about hear output. Its never been an issue for me despite working in a small room.
The reduction in desktop space per dollar spent is not greater than the cost of the desktop space.
And I really like strong desks. Woodworking is something I'm working on developing as a means of taking a break from programming. I'm currently planning a much bigger desk to easily accomodate more monitors and computers.
In addition, from a simple cost per pixel and cost per square inch of presentation area, CRTs still blow away LCDs. LCDs are also still far behind in ability to correct color presentation and present colors accurately across the entire surface area of the display.
So, all in all, I think it a promising technology for the future desktop/wall, and a perfect match for notebooks, but given all but the largest budgets, I'd still go for spending the same amount of money on multiple CRTs versus single LCDs. It makes all the difference in the world to me to be able to see several forms at once and plenty of vertical content on each when programming.
I thought the same thing until I realized that 90% of the monitors on the shelf were lying about their maximum resolution. The masks on most of them are not fine enough to support 1600x1200. You can see this by looking at the colon on the clock with a magnifying glass. If the edges of the dot are fuzzy at 1600x1200, the monitor doesn't support 1600x1200 resolution.
The first time I bought a 19", I took it back because of this. I then set the store's computer to 1600x1200 and went to each of the monitors with a magnifier and checked them out. I found 1 out of 12 that didn't lie about it's resolution. Interestingly, it was the next to the cheapest one and supported that resolution very nicely at 75Hz.
Since then, I've found the CRT's ease on the eyes and color correctness to be vastly better than the LCDs.
I've also noticed that the capabilities of the CRTs have been decreasing instead of increasing at an expected rate. Also, new CRT technologies that would vastly reduce the depth of the screens do not seem to be getting pursued. I believe the manufacturers to be sabotaging them to support the myth that the LCD's are easier on the eyes (they are if the CRTs aren't made right).
The way I see it, where everyone should have 3 or 4 times the display surface today for the same money they spent 5 years ago, instead, they are getting roped into a world of lesser pixels and smaller screens for more money. There must be a profit motive behind it, though all the manufacturer's still claim to be losing money on the LCDs. It all seems fishy.
Another point that I should have made somewhere in this article is that the optimum resolution for human vision of light emissive displays at arms length is supposedly around 300 DPI. Apparently, this is a little lower than optimum for printed results because its emissive instead of reflective. IBM has proven in studies that increasing DPI to 300DPI does more to rest the eyes than increasing vertical refresh rates. I read somewhere that Microsoft's operating systems now support up to 480 DPI. This change happened shortly after IBM's study and I believe was prompted by it. In short, we chased the wrong solution for eye strain for many years. Vertical refresh rate isn't near as big a player as resolution as long as the persistence of the pixels is properly matched to the refresh rate.