When I took programming in high school (mid 80's), I had a teacher who was adamant that we should take a typing course.
My excuse for not doing so was that I was going to switch to a Dvorak layout for my keyboard, thus rendering my QWERTY touch-typing skills entirely useless.
Of course, that never happened, but she doesn't know that.;)
Seriously, man, I learned to type by entering programs from computer magazine printouts by hand. What other training could a programmer possibly need?
It's really a set of 256 (254, really because you aren't supposed to use 0 or 255)/24 networks:
192.168.1.0/24
192.168.2.0/24
192.168.3.0/24 ...
192.168.254.0/24
Now, if you set up your internal routing and gateways correctly, the difference doesn't matter, but TECHNICALLY, since 192 starts with the binary digits '110', it's a class C (/24) network.
FYI.
Which (10.0.0.0/8 or 192.168.0.0/24) you use doesn't matter unless you need to connect your network to somebody else's, but a bad decision (or evaluation of capacity) early on can come back to create problems if your network grows beyond the address space you planned for it. GOOD DESIGN IS ESSENTIAL to preventing problems down the road. Usually the # of hosts you need on your network segments drives the decision. Some larger networks will use the/24 blocks for local departmental LANs, and hook them together with/8 block addresses on the internetwork routers, but there are gobs of ways to do it.
I'd recommend searching Cisco's site for white papers on network design, or maybe googling for TCP/IP tutorials.
Hrrrummph! As usual, everything in RL is backward from video games.
Do you people even realize, if RL had savegame capability, how many times I would have blown away the idiot at Taco Bell who can't get my order right beause he's too busy IM-ing his girlfriend to be interrupted with customers?
Save points as punishment, indeed! *NOT* having save points is the *REAL* punishment!
But that also makes things like this possible. IIRC, the virus comes to you as a zipped MIME/html file. You unzip the file and double-click it and it extracts the virus binary from a base64 encoded section of the document.
This was the SOB that forced me to add ZIP and HTML files to the RenAttach bad list on our mail server.
OK, well met, it's called the "lameness filter" for a reason, but you have to admit that there are occasions where stuff like ASCII art and all caps are useful, don't you? Besides, my original version wasn't even all-caps, it was only, like 50% caps at best.
A while back, somebody suggested changing the karma system to allow you to circumvent the lameness filter for individual comments at a cost of karma. Something like my all-caps infraction would cost, say 2 points if I still wanted to post it. If I wanted to post a ASCII-art map of Canada or maybe some math equations to make a point in some discussion, that would cost me 10 or 15 karma. Maybe this feature is disallowed altogether for people who have less than 25 karma. I think the prices should be high, but still give you some breathing room.
I mean, hey, I'm not using my karma for anything. Once it's maxed out, it's pretty useless, right?
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".
The first time I read that paragraph, I misread your grandfather saying "here, you might need this." with great enthuisiasm.
... or even competent! How many rippers can't get the tagging right when the song and artist ARE PRINTED RIGHT THERE ON THE LOUSY CD COVERSLIP! Sheesh! Learn the difference betwenn Meat Loaf and Leo Sayer for cryin' out loud!
The part of my brain that led me into the Women's Studies department in college is glowing tonight, after reading about a new computer game camp set up for teenage girls.
Mine was supposed to hit the ol' direct-deposit account this morning, but email's been a little slow, so my bank hasn't sent me a confirmation yet... Oh, wait, here it is:
From: idiotuser@msn.com To: groovydude1337@slashdot.org Re: You're Approved!
Cool, it looks like it's a...
it's a...
it's a...
damn.
Beats me -- I'm still swamped trying to develop a web shopping site that lets you buy things with less than 2 mouse clicks. (I've got it down to four!)
Maybe I can give you a hand once I get this whole "hyperlink" thing in the box and ready to ship.
I've had a gripe about random number research since I sat in on a guest colloquium on this topic in the late 80's.
The word "random" cannot describe a result, only the process that generates that result. A truly random generator should be entirely capable of generating such patterned sequences like 1,2,3,4,5,6; although it should select them no more or less than any other sequence you care to consider interesting.
Put another way, every seemingly random sequence will mean something very special to somebody eventually.
If you set out with the assumption that such patterned results must never occur, then you have biased your generator against certain results, and your generator is therefore, BY DEFINITION, not random. In fact, a predisposed inability to generate such sequences should be grounds for discrediting a generator.
This drove me crazy (like a splinter, not like explaining Scott Baio's career) all through the lecture and beyond.
But, alas, we live in the world of the human, where we have sex, UFOs, attorneys, crop circles, knee-jerk reactions to politically charged topics and Mighty Mouse. In *THIS* world, the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6 **IS** special, because we are hopelessly devoid of really genuinely new ideas. Just like computers work be copying, we work by finding and engaging patterns.
So, I decided that randomness has nothing to do with it. Their real goal isn't a flat probability function, but throwing out the first few percent of possibilities the bad guys are likely to try first so they are forced to think harder.
I also decided that when cryptography and number theory people say "random", they really mean "unpredictable" or "unpatterened" and I should just leave it at that. I just wish they hadn't been so careless in choosing language to describe what they were doing that has such a confusingly similar meaning outside their field.
I just found
this article from The Salt Lake Tribune via Google News that posted earlier today.
In a nutshell:
Executives at Lindon, Utah-based SCO Group have sold more than 126,000 shares for about $1.2 million since the IBM suit was filed. Before that, SCO insiders hadn't sold shares in more than a year. The officials are facing higher tax bills because of the increased value of their options and restricted shares, said Chief Executive Darl McBride. The shares have gained more than fourfold since the company filed suit against IBM in March.
"The guys don't want to be selling," McBride said. McBride said he has no plans to sell his shares. Senior Vice President Chris Sontag, who heads the company's software-licensing unit, also hasn't sold shares, McBride said.
The executives are selling shares on a preset schedule to avoid suggestions of improper trading, McBride said. The SEC's Rule 10b5-1 allows insiders to sell shares of their company on a preset schedule, even if he or she has information that could affect the stock price. Insiders at companies including Staples Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have used 10b5-1 plans.
Now, that's DARL'S position on the matter and niether he nor Sontag have sold any stock yet. The stock that has been sold totals around 1.2 million for everyone, which is chump change in terms of the current value of their portfolios.
Yeah, they might be dumping stock, but it looks like they're doing it legally.
Take a strong paper towel and get it moist with 90+% isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Remove the ball and use your finger wrapped up inside the paper towel to rub the wheels, as you say, parallel to axis. It'll all come off in a jif.... gif.... whatever.
90% isopropyl is about as close to solvents as you want to get around PC parts. It'll remove any crud you got in there, and it won't damage the parts any..... probably.
Having been doing software testing for about 10 years now, I can pretty much guess that Microsoft is like most other software places in that lots of things are discovered in test that still make it out the door.
Testing only tells you if the software does what you designed it to do. Whether they find/fix extra bugs during testing or not, I would submit that Microsoft's problem is that their design is flawed. In their mad rush to ACTIVE-ate and DYNAMIC-ize every product they sell with data-embedded scripting and network connectivity, they decided the doors and windows should be wide open from the get-go, whether the bug-screens are in place and working or not.
IIRC, the effectiveness of traditional polygraph "lie detector" tests depends ENTIRELY on the skill of the test administrator. In other words, the machine isn't testing you, the tester is testing you and his goal is not to determine whether you are telling the truth, but to determine if you BELIEVE you are telling the truth. The machine is just a device to put the test administrator in position to conduct this analysis.
I'm not sure (never had a LD test), but I think it uses a lot of super-secret techniques similar to the cold reading stuff that fraud(**) John Edwards uses on his ridiculous T.V. show.
However, the kind of voice stress analysis mentioned in the article is probably of as much practical use as E.S.P. and "remote viewing", so I agree with you that this story goes in the PR bucket.
Even if Nintendo's consoles tank, they will still be around for years to come because they know how to design games. They'll just pull a Sega and we'll all be playing Animal Crossing 3 on our Playstation 5 Mega-Media Centers in a few years.
Back when I started consulting in the late 80's, I could pick up a telephone and call an 800 number and usually talk to a REAL LIVE ENGINEER (in many cases, the guys and gals that actually designed the software or hardware in question) because a lot of companies rotated through their engineers through the tech support department as part of their dudies. Nowadays, they get way too large a volume of calls for that to be prectical.
Most of the time, I don't even bother calling tech support anymore becuase it's not worth my time unless I have a specific question. I wish I had an ID card I could swipe on my phone that would ID me as compenent to stand trial by direct-escalation-to-third-level-support.
Odds are, if I'm bothering to call, it's not a loose plug.
What's wrong with shell scripting? The syntax is just goofy, like it was designed by someone who was obsessed with palindromes and hadn't realized the full potential of curly braces:
if... fi
case... esac
Who came up with that?!
And why?!
Bourne scripting doesn't work like any other language because it was designed in the neanderthal age where everyone writing software had to engineer their own language parsers first because books about syntax hadn't been invented yet! [grin] Although, to be fair, parts of it like "$" evaluation of variable values and string handling *were* innovative enough to get picked up and by other languages like Perl and its derivatives.
Look, none of my points are complaints, they're annoyances - and I hope nobody takes them too seriously because they aren't serious enough for me to.... see, I already forgot most of them.
I do wish, however, that the standardized approach of newer apps (Apache, Mozilla et al.) on XML style config files with common scripting style syntax could be extended backward to legacy software that, to be honest, is too entranched to change.
Maybe we need a DASH (Deade Again - it's a pun) shell with a javascript-like syntax?
Slashdot Mirror
/corrected.
When I took programming in high school (mid 80's), I had a teacher who was adamant that we should take a typing course.
My excuse for not doing so was that I was going to switch to a Dvorak layout for my keyboard, thus rendering my QWERTY touch-typing skills entirely useless.
Of course, that never happened, but she doesn't know that.
Seriously, man, I learned to type by entering programs from computer magazine printouts by hand. What other training could a programmer possibly need?
192.168.0.0/16 doesn't exist.
It's really a set of 256 (254, really because you aren't supposed to use 0 or 255)
192.168.1.0/24
192.168.2.0/24
192.168.3.0/24
192.168.254.0/24
Now, if you set up your internal routing and gateways correctly, the difference doesn't matter, but TECHNICALLY, since 192 starts with the binary digits '110', it's a class C (/24) network.
FYI.
Which (10.0.0.0/8 or 192.168.0.0/24) you use doesn't matter unless you need to connect your network to somebody else's, but a bad decision (or evaluation of capacity) early on can come back to create problems if your network grows beyond the address space you planned for it. GOOD DESIGN IS ESSENTIAL to preventing problems down the road. Usually the # of hosts you need on your network segments drives the decision. Some larger networks will use the
I'd recommend searching Cisco's site for white papers on network design, or maybe googling for TCP/IP tutorials.
Hrrrummph! As usual, everything in RL is backward from video games.
Do you people even realize, if RL had savegame capability, how many times I would have blown away the idiot at Taco Bell who can't get my order right beause he's too busy IM-ing his girlfriend to be interrupted with customers?
Save points as punishment, indeed! *NOT* having save points is the *REAL* punishment!
But that also makes things like this possible. IIRC, the virus comes to you as a zipped MIME/html file. You unzip the file and double-click it and it extracts the virus binary from a base64 encoded section of the document.
This was the SOB that forced me to add ZIP and HTML files to the RenAttach bad list on our mail server.
OK, well met, it's called the "lameness filter" for a reason, but you have to admit that there are occasions where stuff like ASCII art and all caps are useful, don't you? Besides, my original version wasn't even all-caps, it was only, like 50% caps at best.
A while back, somebody suggested changing the karma system to allow you to circumvent the lameness filter for individual comments at a cost of karma. Something like my all-caps infraction would cost, say 2 points if I still wanted to post it. If I wanted to post a ASCII-art map of Canada or maybe some math equations to make a point in some discussion, that would cost me 10 or 15 karma. Maybe this feature is disallowed altogether for people who have less than 25 karma. I think the prices should be high, but still give you some breathing room.
I mean, hey, I'm not using my karma for anything. Once it's maxed out, it's pretty useless, right?
I think that's the geekiest thing I've ever read that didn't involve electricity.
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".
The first time I read that paragraph, I misread your grandfather saying "here, you might need this." with great enthuisiasm.
(Sigh)...
That says it all, doesn't it.
Audio rippers aren't always perfect AFAIK.
... or even competent! How many rippers can't get the tagging right when the song and artist ARE PRINTED RIGHT THERE ON THE LOUSY CD COVERSLIP! Sheesh! Learn the difference betwenn Meat Loaf and Leo Sayer for cryin' out loud!
DAMN YOU, MOD POINTS!!!!
+6 Funny. You made my day.
P.S. I hate the frickin lameness filter. After I typed that, the preview returned:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
No kidding! It's *like* yelling, because it's *supposed* *to* *be* yelling. Ugh.
The part of my brain that led me into the Women's Studies department in college is glowing tonight, after reading about a new computer game camp set up for teenage girls.
Dude.
There are easier ways to meet chicks.
(Sorry.... couldn't resist!)
Mine was supposed to hit the ol' direct-deposit account this morning, but email's been a little slow, so my bank hasn't sent me a confirmation yet... Oh, wait, here it is:
Cool, it looks like it's a...
it's a...
it's a...
damn.
Nope. I'm not getting anything from IBM either.
What do you think? Would it work?
Beats me -- I'm still swamped trying to develop a web shopping site that lets you buy things with less than 2 mouse clicks. (I've got it down to four!)
Maybe I can give you a hand once I get this whole "hyperlink" thing in the box and ready to ship.
We sociologists don't like to use the term "community," particularly--we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces.
Ugh! Where do I start?!
SocioloGY might be trying to answer interesting questions, but mefears that socioloGISTS might be the wrong people for the job.
I've had a gripe about random number research since I sat in on a guest colloquium on this topic in the late 80's.
The word "random" cannot describe a result, only the process that generates that result. A truly random generator should be entirely capable of generating such patterned sequences like 1,2,3,4,5,6; although it should select them no more or less than any other sequence you care to consider interesting.
Put another way, every seemingly random sequence will mean something very special to somebody eventually.
If you set out with the assumption that such patterned results must never occur, then you have biased your generator against certain results, and your generator is therefore, BY DEFINITION, not random. In fact, a predisposed inability to generate such sequences should be grounds for discrediting a generator.
This drove me crazy (like a splinter, not like explaining Scott Baio's career) all through the lecture and beyond.
But, alas, we live in the world of the human, where we have sex, UFOs, attorneys, crop circles, knee-jerk reactions to politically charged topics and Mighty Mouse. In *THIS* world, the sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6 **IS** special, because we are hopelessly devoid of really genuinely new ideas. Just like computers work be copying, we work by finding and engaging patterns.
So, I decided that randomness has nothing to do with it. Their real goal isn't a flat probability function, but throwing out the first few percent of possibilities the bad guys are likely to try first so they are forced to think harder.
I also decided that when cryptography and number theory people say "random", they really mean "unpredictable" or "unpatterened" and I should just leave it at that. I just wish they hadn't been so careless in choosing language to describe what they were doing that has such a confusingly similar meaning outside their field.
Wow, what a coinkeydink!
I just found this article from The Salt Lake Tribune via Google News that posted earlier today.
In a nutshell:
Now, that's DARL'S position on the matter and niether he nor Sontag have sold any stock yet. The stock that has been sold totals around 1.2 million for everyone, which is chump change in terms of the current value of their portfolios.
Yeah, they might be dumping stock, but it looks like they're doing it legally.
Take a strong paper towel and get it moist with 90+% isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Remove the ball and use your finger wrapped up inside the paper towel to rub the wheels, as you say, parallel to axis. It'll all come off in a jif.... gif.... whatever.
90% isopropyl is about as close to solvents as you want to get around PC parts. It'll remove any crud you got in there, and it won't damage the parts any..... probably.
Having been doing software testing for about 10 years now, I can pretty much guess that Microsoft is like most other software places in that lots of things are discovered in test that still make it out the door.
Testing only tells you if the software does what you designed it to do. Whether they find/fix extra bugs during testing or not, I would submit that Microsoft's problem is that their design is flawed. In their mad rush to ACTIVE-ate and DYNAMIC-ize every product they sell with data-embedded scripting and network connectivity, they decided the doors and windows should be wide open from the get-go, whether the bug-screens are in place and working or not.
IIRC, the effectiveness of traditional polygraph "lie detector" tests depends ENTIRELY on the skill of the test administrator. In other words, the machine isn't testing you, the tester is testing you and his goal is not to determine whether you are telling the truth, but to determine if you BELIEVE you are telling the truth. The machine is just a device to put the test administrator in position to conduct this analysis.
I'm not sure (never had a LD test), but I think it uses a lot of super-secret techniques similar to the cold reading stuff that fraud(**) John Edwards uses on his ridiculous T.V. show.
However, the kind of voice stress analysis mentioned in the article is probably of as much practical use as E.S.P. and "remote viewing", so I agree with you that this story goes in the PR bucket.
(**) My opinon, but The Amazing Randi still has his money.
Irrelevant!
Even if Nintendo's consoles tank, they will still be around for years to come because they know how to design games. They'll just pull a Sega and we'll all be playing Animal Crossing 3 on our Playstation 5 Mega-Media Centers in a few years.
Uuuuughh! "duTies", not "duDies"! Stupid keyboard.
Can't do violence against a human? My freshly swallowed arrow-wielding squarebody surrenders.
Back when I started consulting in the late 80's, I could pick up a telephone and call an 800 number and usually talk to a REAL LIVE ENGINEER (in many cases, the guys and gals that actually designed the software or hardware in question) because a lot of companies rotated through their engineers through the tech support department as part of their dudies. Nowadays, they get way too large a volume of calls for that to be prectical.
Most of the time, I don't even bother calling tech support anymore becuase it's not worth my time unless I have a specific question. I wish I had an ID card I could swipe on my phone that would ID me as compenent to stand trial by direct-escalation-to-third-level-support.
Odds are, if I'm bothering to call, it's not a loose plug.
Bingo.
I'm beginning to think the only company that does it right is Apple.
What's wrong with shell scripting? The syntax is just goofy, like it was designed by someone who was obsessed with palindromes and hadn't realized the full potential of curly braces:
Who came up with that?!
And why?!
Bourne scripting doesn't work like any other language because it was designed in the neanderthal age where everyone writing software had to engineer their own language parsers first because books about syntax hadn't been invented yet! [grin] Although, to be fair, parts of it like "$" evaluation of variable values and string handling *were* innovative enough to get picked up and by other languages like Perl and its derivatives.
Look, none of my points are complaints, they're annoyances - and I hope nobody takes them too seriously because they aren't serious enough for me to
I do wish, however, that the standardized approach of newer apps (Apache, Mozilla et al.) on XML style config files with common scripting style syntax could be extended backward to legacy software that, to be honest, is too entranched to change.
Maybe we need a DASH (Deade Again - it's a pun) shell with a javascript-like syntax?