Like what happened in the states, like in Florida, where dead people just happen pop out of the grave and vote
The dead people were getting old, so they moved from Chicago to Miami, like most people in Chicago do when they get older.
Interesting factoid:
It's not commonly known, but the reason so many old people end up in Florida in the first place is that they shrink as they get older. As they shrink, their ability to see out of their cars decreases, until all they can see is the little crescent moon of sky between the dashboard and the top of their steering wheel -- this is also the primary cause of the so-called "ghost car effect", where a car appears to drive itself; the secondary cause, as any idiot knows, is Google. When this happens, all they can see is birds, and since birds are migratory, the old people end up going South as well, and end up in Florida (West of the Rocky Mountains, they end up in Arizona).
I knew that the iPhone, in order to be in compliant with federal law, had to give me an unlock code after the contract expired. I had a reasonable expectation that they would comply with this law, until the end of the second year after the first iPhones release, at which point it became obvious they had shot themselves in the foot.
I could either have no TV or one with the broadcast bit. I had a reasonable expectation that my television would not have the broadcast bit enabled at any point in the future due to their compliance with FCC rules in effect at the time of the purchase.
The DRM in these things are not the things themselves, they are incidental to them. Yes, this could be the basis of a class action lawsuit in these cases.
I paid for those atoms, they will damn well do what I tell them to.
I sell you a book, car, TV, shirt, power drill. You pay a fair price for it.
Then with an update, I remove your book from your reader, limit your car to driving 30mph, your TV to only working with bluray content so you can't use your DVD's any more, remove the pocket from your shirt, and limit your power drill to using phillips head bits so you have to buy a nother drill for star, hex, and flat head bits.
You can't do those things. But with digitial updates, not only can you do it, it is happening already.
Sure you can, at least with TVs. Remember the Broadcast Flag? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag -- It's already been used to remove value from devices purchased like that, by NBC on 18 May 2008.
Game systems with modchips and pay-per-view systems with programmable paycards have similarly been remotely disabled. While technically more grey-market, if you consider third party content not being permitted onto a physical device, which is perfectly legal, denying network access to these devices when they are not being used for circumvention purposes definitely also falls under making the hardware less useful after I've already purchased it.
Similarly, Amazon has already revoked ownership of books -- ironically, George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" -- from on the Kindle; there's no reason to believe they couldn't revoke anything, including the books which persuaded you to buy the Kindle in the first place (if they weren't the Orwell books already revoked).
I'll stop after this last example, but there are many others...
iPhone carrier locking. U.S. Law requires that a carrier unlock a cell phone from the original carrier in the event of contract buy-out, or normal time-based termination, at the request of the customer who wants the device unlocked. Yet you can not get the iPhone unlocked by requesting an unlock code. The reason? The code for the unlock is not known to the carrier, nor is it even known, or recratable, by Apple; it lives only on a secure server in the factory in China, and not all of them have been stored. Why? The code is a combination of the IMEI of the device, and the flash chip serial number for the baseband flash, and a secret key known only to that server, and that information is not exposed in such a way that it's even physically possible for someone to give you an unlock code.
Like the HDCP key revocation, Amazon key revocation, or the broadcast bit, it's a submarine attack on a device which you purchased in good faith.
So basically, your argument that physical artifacts don't suffer from this problem is BS.
Software followed hardware closely enough to soak up all the advances in compute power, and sometimes and then some.
Kirk McKusick likes to say "the number of MIPS delivered to the keyboard has remained constant since 1978".
The other one I like is "An elephant is a mouse with an operating system", which is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein putting words into the mouth of his character Lazarus Long.
You may not like them, but that in no way makes your statements valid. PPAPI is BSD licensed, and so usable everywhere a browser vendor chooses to use it.
NaCl on the other hand allows for native binaries using (effectively) the same APIs available to JavaScript, in compliance with W3C standards. In other words, if it's safe to run JavaScript from some web site, it's safe to run NaCl from some web site. The only difference is that it will run faster. It also isn't locked into a particular CPU: the eventual goal is to support llvm bitcode as the intermediary:
You should like that last one: if successful, it will rip away the monopoly control from vendor-locked in App stores by standardizing the ability to run code that isn't controllable by a single party.
Depends. In this scenario, am I the contractor chosen to make the passport, the government agency that has to justify asking for a budget increase next year, or a Senator from a district with an RFID manufacturer in it?
I think you're the terrorist building the IEDs that blow up when they see a US passport. Or maybe the one who builds the same device, but it only blows when a Visa card is in range. You have to wonder at the stupidity of self identifying like this, particularly in places where you're not liked, which frankly, is probably any place you'd need a passport to get to.
FWIW, Mythbusters was banned from talking about the hackability and trackability of RFID by Amex, Discover, Visa, and Mastercard:
you used the word "kilogram". Everybody knows that only Americans launch stuff, and they launch pounds. Except for Mars explorers, then they launch bricks.
The problem with "freedom" is that people like you use it wrong, and make incorrect choices. It's all there in black and white, and people still vote for racists like Santorum with a smile on their faces. Having proven that you can't be trusted with political power, others must step in and run things for you, the correct way. We're just lucky we have so many smart people who know better. You had your chance and you blew it. No sympathy here.
But I like it because I am in the class of "smart people", so I am incredibly biased, as are probably most slashdot persons. Way to play to the audience...
It is not science's job to disprove a supernatural claim made by someone. We need positive proof; repeatable positive proof. That is how science works. We know water boils at 100 degrees Celsius(~at sea level, of course) . And we know it because it has been positively proven countless times by people trying to figure out at exactly what temperature water boils.
OK, let's talk Science witha big "S".
You can only demand the ability to falsify. We have a theory that water boils at 100C at standard pressure. It has yet to be falsified, but it's still a theory, just like the theory that when you let go of things they will fall. If you have a repeatable disproof, present it.
Scientists are the clever bastards who figure out the implications of a theory and then devise a test to decide whether or not the implications follow through. If they do, the theory lives another day, otherwise, it's discredited, and we spend a lot of time to think up a new story to tell ourselves.
PhD = Doctorate of Philosophy. This isn't a mistake, this is an intentional conjoin between observable phenomena and the theories that result (or don't) in additional observable phenomena given a set of initial conditions.
Science is all about prediction of future events based on initial conditions, and if your idea isn't predictive, it isn't scientific, it's faith, or to use scientific terminology to coat it in a respectability it probably doesn't deserve, "conjecture".
Experiments are all about setting up initial conditions, and pressing the "go" button.
Interpretation of experimental results is all about deciding what the conditions do or don't say about the theories: "were the predictions wrong?" Not "were they right?", no one gives a damn about that; a broken clock is "right" twice a day.
Correct predictions only argue about utility of theories under particular conditions. They do not argue for correctness of the theories themselves. The broken clock is "right" at 6:16 every day, and we can't know we haven't accidentally looked at just the right time.
I really think that classrooms should concentrate on experiments with surprising results to teach this to students, but to teach that would be to teach questioning all sources of information, including your teachers, and that ends with... the people who are going to die before you die losing power over you,
It's not his job (or sciences) to disprove the extraordinary things people claim. It is their job to prove it. That's just a basic concept.
Actually it *is* science's job to disprove it.
Science is a philosophy that starts from the premise that you can't prove anything, you can only disprove things. Then we tell ourselves stories to explain our observations (form a hypothesis or theory), make predictions based on the logical consequences of the hypothesis, and then come up with thests (design experiments) whose outcome would prove the story false.
The corollary is that sometimes we have stories that are simple and elegant and are found to be predictive in a subset of the observable univers (a problem domain), so we use them there, even though we know they don't fit the big picture. Newtonian mechanics is an example of this: for non-relativistic events, they give approximate answers that are good enough, unless you need too many decimal places.
This is also why "creationism" isn't a theory: it doesn't make predictions about future events, so it's impossible to design an experiment to falsify it as a theory: a theory must be falsifiable, or it isn't a theory.
So a story about Randi debunking a religion (:theory") is as relevant to Slashdot as a story about the LHC's search for the Higgs Boson, which is a set of experiments designed to falsify ("debunk") certain theories about the basic nature of the universe (many string theories, in particular).
You mean like accepting credit card payments and signatures with the device, right?
You want me to trust a Microsoft device with my credit card number?
Their track record!... I!... Ugh!... I'm speechless!... Ghah! Let me start over!...
Look, I support a persons right to get high smoking marijuana if they want, but I sort of have to draw the line when they start injecting stuff into their veins.
Technical explanation for the problem, if you care
Not all Amazon content is using the new DRM; if you've already downloaded something, even if it uses DRM, then it will continue to function.
The actual issue is a combination of the Flash 11 update on Jan 31, combined with Amazon switching Flash Access DRM on Feb 4/5/6.
The Flash Access DRM requires downloading and installing a new shared object, which is why it complains about needing an upgrade.
The code is busted. It uses hald/libhal (which was deprecate in May 2008 by FreeDesktop.org) in order to construct a unique machine identifier for use in the Flash Access DRM.
The code is busted again. It attempts to communicate with hald using dbus, and when it can't, it assumes that the problem is a faulty component, rather than hald not answering the phone because it hasn't been installed. So basically, it's piss-poor error checking in the code that results in the update request, for the wrong reason.
So for most Linux systems, you can just do "apt-get install hal", and your Amazon will start working again.
This won't work for embedded systems with trusted code paths that need to sign code and won't download random crap onto your machine by default. I suspect the Blackberry would fall into this category. For these systems, you'd need an update from the vendor which included the Flash Access shared object.
If it makes you feel any better, almost every Linux and BSD based system on the planet got bit on the butt by this.
It's a good argument against DRM, even if you weren't worroed that they would upload your specific device identification information in a non-hashed form, and use that information with other databases to correlate your network activity.
Your question is too broad and too general to be meaningful, since the answer is going to be "it depends on the role they have in mind for you".
There is no such thing as a meaningful definition of a "certified software test engineer", and there is no such thing as "best common practices" or anything else that would give a common, formal definition of what someone has called "Software Test Engineer" in a job posting means by the title.
It means whatever it means to the person who told the job poster to write in the job posting. Usually, job postings have lists of relevant experience, certifications/degrees, and tools familiarities which will give you some clue.
Most software testing is Ad Hoc (read: "not reproducible without activity logging"), and most automated testing is reactive (read: "sure hope we don't see this bug again, let's write a test which will probably never fail again"), rather than a result of a formal specification to which actual software behaviour can be compared.
It's possible to get to the point where software testing is a formal discipline, but in general, no one seems very interested in doing so unless you are talking about life support systems (e.g. getting correct results from medical equipment, not sending a reactor hypercritical, or not crashing a Mars probe into the ground). Even then, desire is not frequently reduced to practice, and mistakes are made.
PS: attempting to cram for an interview almost always leads to bad things: claims on your resume to knowledge you do not have in depth, and can not answer deep questions on, or worse, getting a position for which you are not qualified and futzing everything up for everyone else involved.
Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. As part of a democracy, they're supposed to have everybody's best interests at heart. That includes the carpenters working on the movie sets that lose funding if the studio collapses.
If the studio collapses, I have no problems with them losing funding, since it means they weren't very good carpenters in the first place. Send those guys to work at McDonalds, and hire better carpenters whose work won't collapse.
The median income is before taxes, and the median houshold with children is 2.5 kids. So 6,300 * 2.5 = 18,900 vs. 61,000 / 2 = 30,500 is still well over half.
There's still benefit in insurance even if you think you can self-manage your risk.
1) You cant actually calculate your own risk without a statistically significant number of events, and by then you are probably finished using the item.
Is that really true?
If they are going to crawl so far into my underwear with me that they can get actual numbers, why wouldn't I just get a quote from them and then not buy from them?
I mean if their quote honestly represents their assessment of risk plus a small profit, then haven't they just done the calculation for me that you said I couldn't do myself? And I didn't even have to pay my own actuary!
In a good system the resources are already there, and as far as I know that is pretty much the case in Japan. So the only logical conclusion is: "Philanthropy is a solution to a problem that shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) exist."
The problem with funding like this is that it empties public research into private ownership by making funding the goal of schools. The first and foremost goal of schools is and should be to teach.
In California, we have this terrible system which from the article seems to be on the brink of being exported to Japan.
To put things in perspective, almost 36% of all taxes in California go to education ($49 Billion FY2012-2013 : http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html), and that's not including money from bond initiatives for stem cell research or other earmarks which end up at research universities, and it's not including the costs of education as part of rehabilitation for the mentally ill or incarcerated prisoners, which end up being another $18B (drill down on the numbers on that government site).
If you consider only K-12, there are 9,600 publicly funded schools serving 6.2M students (http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fb/index.asp); that's a cost of $63,000 per student, working out to ~$4M per school.
And the teachers at the schools in my area are constantly trying to raise funds for books, paper, pencils, and white board markers. At $63,000 per student per year, you'd think they'd buy them a damn box of pencils.
Before you try to claim "that's not a lot per student", realize that the median household income in California is less than that, it's just under $61,000 for the whole family, including all wage earners (U.S. Census : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html).
I don't know where the hell all this money is going (I'd like an independent audit, please!) but it sure as hell isn't getting to the classrooms, so it has to be disappearing somewhere between the Franchise Tax Board and the classrooms.
As far as higher education is concerned, the colleges around here are canceling classes all over the place. You'd think that the more students they had, the more tuition they'd get, the more classes they'd have, but no, tuition collected is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the almost $10B in taxes paid to them by the state, and they optimize on the basis of revenue instead (hey, why have a student spend 4 years * tuition, when you can cancel a class and have them spend 5 years * tuition instead?). They also optimize it by preferentially admitting out of state students (who have to pay higher tuitions), but that's OK, those students can go to other states themselves, and pay out of state tuition there, instead.
And this is the model school system you are going to hold up for other countries to follow?
Hyper-V got "broken" over a single release by an arbitrary OpenStack change that didn't try at all.
Hyper-V was broken by OpenStack in less than the 3 year amortization schedule for computer hardware and software permitted by FAS (Federal Accounting Standards). If they want to be taken as a serious comercial-competitive product, they have to permit the accountants to keep old software they work with around 3 years.
Your OS X examples all have one thing in common: 5-10 years before the official switch is thrown, which is well in excess of when a normal business would have had to throw the hardware out in order to avoid IRS penalties for continuing to use hardware they'd already amortized the value out of.
Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good... OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility... Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress.
That's BS. Apple maintained binary backward compatibility with 68K Mac OS for multiple releases, then kept maintaining support for older programs using the Blue Box (Classic) environment. When the Intel switchover happened, they again maintained binary compatibility with PPC software over several releases using Rosetta.
Carbon was a stopgap solution that was not intended to survive transition to native APIs, yet stayed around far longer than it should have. It finally got shot in the head when 64 bit GUI libraries finally shipped because it was impossible to jam a 64 bit inode number into a 32 bit hard-coded on disk structure for the file ID mechanism without losing backward compatibility anyway.
The only thing people miss is Carbon, because they were using the CodeWarrior compiler, and all its C++ glue was based on reexporting the Carbon APIs instead of the Cocoa APIs, and they never got their act together to move the code to the APIs they were supposed to have been using instead. Mostly that came down to Adobe Photoshop plugins, and Adobe not doing the right thing with regard to Coca with plugins and binary compatibility on their part.
As a kernel engineer at Apple, I had to leave a glaring security hole in the kernel for two releases because of not being allowed to break binary compatibility with programs that had used a particular sysctl() that they had been told not to used, and that they were supposed to popen() the ps program instead, if they wanted to enumerate processes. Mostly this was because people not dropping pid files in/var/run simply because they didn't understand the UNIXy way of communicating process information was to record the information apriori rather than scanning the running processes to see if the Final Cut Pro renderer (for example) was already hanging around.
It's basically damn near impossible to deprecate anything at Apple in less than three release cycles. You would not believe the cruft that's still hanging around because of that. It took forever, but some of us finally jammed through __deprecated in and started marking APIs we wanted dead. Still takes three release cycles to kill something, but at least people can't use a deprecated API and -Werror at the same time, and get nastygrams from the compiler if they use XCode with the default settings.
NB: I work at Google now, so it's not like I've said any of the above out a misguided sense of company loyalty.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, uh, that's weird...
-- Terry
Like what happened in the states, like in Florida, where dead people just happen pop out of the grave and vote
The dead people were getting old, so they moved from Chicago to Miami, like most people in Chicago do when they get older.
Interesting factoid:
It's not commonly known, but the reason so many old people end up in Florida in the first place is that they shrink as they get older. As they shrink, their ability to see out of their cars decreases, until all they can see is the little crescent moon of sky between the dashboard and the top of their steering wheel -- this is also the primary cause of the so-called "ghost car effect", where a car appears to drive itself; the secondary cause, as any idiot knows, is Google. When this happens, all they can see is birds, and since birds are migratory, the old people end up going South as well, and end up in Florida (West of the Rocky Mountains, they end up in Arizona).
-- Terry
I knew that the iPhone, in order to be in compliant with federal law, had to give me an unlock code after the contract expired. I had a reasonable expectation that they would comply with this law, until the end of the second year after the first iPhones release, at which point it became obvious they had shot themselves in the foot.
I could either have no TV or one with the broadcast bit. I had a reasonable expectation that my television would not have the broadcast bit enabled at any point in the future due to their compliance with FCC rules in effect at the time of the purchase.
The DRM in these things are not the things themselves, they are incidental to them. Yes, this could be the basis of a class action lawsuit in these cases.
I paid for those atoms, they will damn well do what I tell them to.
-- Terry
Here is how it is different.
I sell you a book, car, TV, shirt, power drill. You pay a fair price for it.
Then with an update, I remove your book from your reader, limit your car to driving 30mph, your TV to only working with bluray content so you can't use your DVD's any more, remove the pocket from your shirt, and limit your power drill to using phillips head bits so you have to buy a nother drill for star, hex, and flat head bits.
You can't do those things. But with digitial updates, not only can you do it, it is happening already.
Sure you can, at least with TVs. Remember the Broadcast Flag? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag -- It's already been used to remove value from devices purchased like that, by NBC on 18 May 2008.
Similarly, HDCP, which is pretty much in all new televisions, DVD players, BLU-Ray players and so on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection -- has a revocation feature which would permit rendering those devices useless as well.
Game systems with modchips and pay-per-view systems with programmable paycards have similarly been remotely disabled. While technically more grey-market, if you consider third party content not being permitted onto a physical device, which is perfectly legal, denying network access to these devices when they are not being used for circumvention purposes definitely also falls under making the hardware less useful after I've already purchased it.
Similarly, Amazon has already revoked ownership of books -- ironically, George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" -- from on the Kindle; there's no reason to believe they couldn't revoke anything, including the books which persuaded you to buy the Kindle in the first place (if they weren't the Orwell books already revoked).
I'll stop after this last example, but there are many others...
iPhone carrier locking. U.S. Law requires that a carrier unlock a cell phone from the original carrier in the event of contract buy-out, or normal time-based termination, at the request of the customer who wants the device unlocked. Yet you can not get the iPhone unlocked by requesting an unlock code. The reason? The code for the unlock is not known to the carrier, nor is it even known, or recratable, by Apple; it lives only on a secure server in the factory in China, and not all of them have been stored. Why? The code is a combination of the IMEI of the device, and the flash chip serial number for the baseband flash, and a secret key known only to that server, and that information is not exposed in such a way that it's even physically possible for someone to give you an unlock code.
Like the HDCP key revocation, Amazon key revocation, or the broadcast bit, it's a submarine attack on a device which you purchased in good faith.
So basically, your argument that physical artifacts don't suffer from this problem is BS.
-- Terry
Software followed hardware closely enough to soak up all the advances in compute power, and sometimes and then some.
Kirk McKusick likes to say "the number of MIPS delivered to the keyboard has remained constant since 1978".
The other one I like is "An elephant is a mouse with an operating system", which is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein putting words into the mouth of his character Lazarus Long.
-- Terry
They are desperate to find some way to recycle the brown Zunes.
-- Terry
You may not like them, but that in no way makes your statements valid. PPAPI is BSD licensed, and so usable everywhere a browser vendor chooses to use it.
NaCl on the other hand allows for native binaries using (effectively) the same APIs available to JavaScript, in compliance with W3C standards. In other words, if it's safe to run JavaScript from some web site, it's safe to run NaCl from some web site. The only difference is that it will run faster. It also isn't locked into a particular CPU: the eventual goal is to support llvm bitcode as the intermediary:
http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing-portable-native-client
You should like that last one: if successful, it will rip away the monopoly control from vendor-locked in App stores by standardizing the ability to run code that isn't controllable by a single party.
-- Terry
Depends. In this scenario, am I the contractor chosen to make the passport, the government agency that has to justify asking for a budget increase next year, or a Senator from a district with an RFID manufacturer in it?
I think you're the terrorist building the IEDs that blow up when they see a US passport. Or maybe the one who builds the same device, but it only blows when a Visa card is in range. You have to wonder at the stupidity of self identifying like this, particularly in places where you're not liked, which frankly, is probably any place you'd need a passport to get to.
FWIW, Mythbusters was banned from talking about the hackability and trackability of RFID by Amex, Discover, Visa, and Mastercard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq7kBhts9a8
-- Terry
you used the word "kilogram". Everybody knows that only Americans launch stuff, and they launch pounds. Except for Mars explorers, then they launch bricks.
-- Terry
The problem with "freedom" is that people like you use it wrong, and make incorrect choices. It's all there in black and white, and people still vote for racists like Santorum with a smile on their faces. Having proven that you can't be trusted with political power, others must step in and run things for you, the correct way. We're just lucky we have so many smart people who know better. You had your chance and you blew it. No sympathy here.
But I like it because I am in the class of "smart people", so I am incredibly biased, as are probably most slashdot persons. Way to play to the audience...
-- Terry
It is not science's job to disprove a supernatural claim made by someone. We need positive proof; repeatable positive proof. That is how science works. We know water boils at 100 degrees Celsius(~at sea level, of course) . And we know it because it has been positively proven countless times by people trying to figure out at exactly what temperature water boils.
OK, let's talk Science witha big "S".
You can only demand the ability to falsify. We have a theory that water boils at 100C at standard pressure. It has yet to be falsified, but it's still a theory, just like the theory that when you let go of things they will fall. If you have a repeatable disproof, present it.
Scientists are the clever bastards who figure out the implications of a theory and then devise a test to decide whether or not the implications follow through. If they do, the theory lives another day, otherwise, it's discredited, and we spend a lot of time to think up a new story to tell ourselves.
PhD = Doctorate of Philosophy. This isn't a mistake, this is an intentional conjoin between observable phenomena and the theories that result (or don't) in additional observable phenomena given a set of initial conditions.
Science is all about prediction of future events based on initial conditions, and if your idea isn't predictive, it isn't scientific, it's faith, or to use scientific terminology to coat it in a respectability it probably doesn't deserve, "conjecture".
Experiments are all about setting up initial conditions, and pressing the "go" button.
Interpretation of experimental results is all about deciding what the conditions do or don't say about the theories: "were the predictions wrong?" Not "were they right?", no one gives a damn about that; a broken clock is "right" twice a day.
Correct predictions only argue about utility of theories under particular conditions. They do not argue for correctness of the theories themselves. The broken clock is "right" at 6:16 every day, and we can't know we haven't accidentally looked at just the right time.
I really think that classrooms should concentrate on experiments with surprising results to teach this to students, but to teach that would be to teach questioning all sources of information, including your teachers, and that ends with ... the people who are going to die before you die losing power over you,
Oops... meant to say "chaos"...
-- Terry
Pretend they are real and pay down the US debt?
-- Terry
It's not his job (or sciences) to disprove the extraordinary things people claim. It is their job to prove it. That's just a basic concept.
Actually it *is* science's job to disprove it.
Science is a philosophy that starts from the premise that you can't prove anything, you can only disprove things. Then we tell ourselves stories to explain our observations (form a hypothesis or theory), make predictions based on the logical consequences of the hypothesis, and then come up with thests (design experiments) whose outcome would prove the story false.
When it comes to debunking, the principle in question is Occam's Razor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
The corollary is that sometimes we have stories that are simple and elegant and are found to be predictive in a subset of the observable univers (a problem domain), so we use them there, even though we know they don't fit the big picture. Newtonian mechanics is an example of this: for non-relativistic events, they give approximate answers that are good enough, unless you need too many decimal places.
This is also why "creationism" isn't a theory: it doesn't make predictions about future events, so it's impossible to design an experiment to falsify it as a theory: a theory must be falsifiable, or it isn't a theory.
So a story about Randi debunking a religion (:theory") is as relevant to Slashdot as a story about the LHC's search for the Higgs Boson, which is a set of experiments designed to falsify ("debunk") certain theories about the basic nature of the universe (many string theories, in particular).
-- Terry
You mean like accepting credit card payments and signatures with the device, right?
You want me to trust a Microsoft device with my credit card number?
Their track record! ... I! ... Ugh! ... I'm speechless! ... Ghah! Let me start over! ...
Look, I support a persons right to get high smoking marijuana if they want, but I sort of have to draw the line when they start injecting stuff into their veins.
-- Terry
Technical explanation for the problem, if you care
Not all Amazon content is using the new DRM; if you've already downloaded something, even if it uses DRM, then it will continue to function.
The actual issue is a combination of the Flash 11 update on Jan 31, combined with Amazon switching Flash Access DRM on Feb 4/5/6.
The Flash Access DRM requires downloading and installing a new shared object, which is why it complains about needing an upgrade.
The code is busted. It uses hald/libhal (which was deprecate in May 2008 by FreeDesktop.org) in order to construct a unique machine identifier for use in the Flash Access DRM.
The code is busted again. It attempts to communicate with hald using dbus, and when it can't, it assumes that the problem is a faulty component, rather than hald not answering the phone because it hasn't been installed. So basically, it's piss-poor error checking in the code that results in the update request, for the wrong reason.
So for most Linux systems, you can just do "apt-get install hal", and your Amazon will start working again.
This won't work for embedded systems with trusted code paths that need to sign code and won't download random crap onto your machine by default. I suspect the Blackberry would fall into this category. For these systems, you'd need an update from the vendor which included the Flash Access shared object.
If it makes you feel any better, almost every Linux and BSD based system on the planet got bit on the butt by this.
It's a good argument against DRM, even if you weren't worroed that they would upload your specific device identification information in a non-hashed form, and use that information with other databases to correlate your network activity.
-- Terry
Actually, it was 5 IBM AP-101s, four of which ran identical software, with the fifth running independently written backup flight software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101
-- Terry
Your question is too broad and too general to be meaningful, since the answer is going to be "it depends on the role they have in mind for you".
There is no such thing as a meaningful definition of a "certified software test engineer", and there is no such thing as "best common practices" or anything else that would give a common, formal definition of what someone has called "Software Test Engineer" in a job posting means by the title.
It means whatever it means to the person who told the job poster to write in the job posting. Usually, job postings have lists of relevant experience, certifications/degrees, and tools familiarities which will give you some clue.
Most software testing is Ad Hoc (read: "not reproducible without activity logging"), and most automated testing is reactive (read: "sure hope we don't see this bug again, let's write a test which will probably never fail again"), rather than a result of a formal specification to which actual software behaviour can be compared.
It's possible to get to the point where software testing is a formal discipline, but in general, no one seems very interested in doing so unless you are talking about life support systems (e.g. getting correct results from medical equipment, not sending a reactor hypercritical, or not crashing a Mars probe into the ground). Even then, desire is not frequently reduced to practice, and mistakes are made.
PS: attempting to cram for an interview almost always leads to bad things: claims on your resume to knowledge you do not have in depth, and can not answer deep questions on, or worse, getting a position for which you are not qualified and futzing everything up for everyone else involved.
-- Terry
Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. As part of a democracy, they're supposed to have everybody's best interests at heart. That includes the carpenters working on the movie sets that lose funding if the studio collapses.
If the studio collapses, I have no problems with them losing funding, since it means they weren't very good carpenters in the first place. Send those guys to work at McDonalds, and hire better carpenters whose work won't collapse.
-- Terry
To heck with pr0n, it might have bitcoins!
-- Terry
Mea Culpa.
The median income is before taxes, and the median houshold with children is 2.5 kids. So 6,300 * 2.5 = 18,900 vs. 61,000 / 2 = 30,500 is still well over half.
-- Terry
Stenotype, which is used for both court reporting and closed captioning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype can typically be operated at 300WPM.
It has the advantage that you can already take classes in it, and that there are tons of people already trained to use it.
I guess Paul Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wittgenstein might appreciate it.
-- Terry
There's still benefit in insurance even if you think you can self-manage your risk.
1) You cant actually calculate your own risk without a statistically significant number of events, and by then you are probably finished using the item.
Is that really true?
If they are going to crawl so far into my underwear with me that they can get actual numbers, why wouldn't I just get a quote from them and then not buy from them?
I mean if their quote honestly represents their assessment of risk plus a small profit, then haven't they just done the calculation for me that you said I couldn't do myself? And I didn't even have to pay my own actuary!
-- Terry
In a good system the resources are already there, and as far as I know that is pretty much the case in Japan. So the only logical conclusion is: "Philanthropy is a solution to a problem that shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) exist."
The problem with funding like this is that it empties public research into private ownership by making funding the goal of schools. The first and foremost goal of schools is and should be to teach.
In California, we have this terrible system which from the article seems to be on the brink of being exported to Japan.
To put things in perspective, almost 36% of all taxes in California go to education ($49 Billion FY2012-2013 : http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html), and that's not including money from bond initiatives for stem cell research or other earmarks which end up at research universities, and it's not including the costs of education as part of rehabilitation for the mentally ill or incarcerated prisoners, which end up being another $18B (drill down on the numbers on that government site).
If you consider only K-12, there are 9,600 publicly funded schools serving 6.2M students (http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fb/index.asp); that's a cost of $63,000 per student, working out to ~$4M per school.
And the teachers at the schools in my area are constantly trying to raise funds for books, paper, pencils, and white board markers. At $63,000 per student per year, you'd think they'd buy them a damn box of pencils.
Before you try to claim "that's not a lot per student", realize that the median household income in California is less than that, it's just under $61,000 for the whole family, including all wage earners (U.S. Census : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html).
I don't know where the hell all this money is going (I'd like an independent audit, please!) but it sure as hell isn't getting to the classrooms, so it has to be disappearing somewhere between the Franchise Tax Board and the classrooms.
As far as higher education is concerned, the colleges around here are canceling classes all over the place. You'd think that the more students they had, the more tuition they'd get, the more classes they'd have, but no, tuition collected is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the almost $10B in taxes paid to them by the state, and they optimize on the basis of revenue instead (hey, why have a student spend 4 years * tuition, when you can cancel a class and have them spend 5 years * tuition instead?). They also optimize it by preferentially admitting out of state students (who have to pay higher tuitions), but that's OK, those students can go to other states themselves, and pay out of state tuition there, instead.
And this is the model school system you are going to hold up for other countries to follow?
Japan: Save yourself before it's too late!
-- Terry
You're side-tracking.
Hyper-V got "broken" over a single release by an arbitrary OpenStack change that didn't try at all.
Hyper-V was broken by OpenStack in less than the 3 year amortization schedule for computer hardware and software permitted by FAS (Federal Accounting Standards). If they want to be taken as a serious comercial-competitive product, they have to permit the accountants to keep old software they work with around 3 years.
Your OS X examples all have one thing in common: 5-10 years before the official switch is thrown, which is well in excess of when a normal business would have had to throw the hardware out in order to avoid IRS penalties for continuing to use hardware they'd already amortized the value out of.
-- Terry
Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good...
OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility...
Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress.
That's BS. Apple maintained binary backward compatibility with 68K Mac OS for multiple releases, then kept maintaining support for older programs using the Blue Box (Classic) environment. When the Intel switchover happened, they again maintained binary compatibility with PPC software over several releases using Rosetta.
Carbon was a stopgap solution that was not intended to survive transition to native APIs, yet stayed around far longer than it should have. It finally got shot in the head when 64 bit GUI libraries finally shipped because it was impossible to jam a 64 bit inode number into a 32 bit hard-coded on disk structure for the file ID mechanism without losing backward compatibility anyway.
The only thing people miss is Carbon, because they were using the CodeWarrior compiler, and all its C++ glue was based on reexporting the Carbon APIs instead of the Cocoa APIs, and they never got their act together to move the code to the APIs they were supposed to have been using instead. Mostly that came down to Adobe Photoshop plugins, and Adobe not doing the right thing with regard to Coca with plugins and binary compatibility on their part.
As a kernel engineer at Apple, I had to leave a glaring security hole in the kernel for two releases because of not being allowed to break binary compatibility with programs that had used a particular sysctl() that they had been told not to used, and that they were supposed to popen() the ps program instead, if they wanted to enumerate processes. Mostly this was because people not dropping pid files in /var/run simply because they didn't understand the UNIXy way of communicating process information was to record the information apriori rather than scanning the running processes to see if the Final Cut Pro renderer (for example) was already hanging around.
It's basically damn near impossible to deprecate anything at Apple in less than three release cycles. You would not believe the cruft that's still hanging around because of that. It took forever, but some of us finally jammed through __deprecated in and started marking APIs we wanted dead. Still takes three release cycles to kill something, but at least people can't use a deprecated API and -Werror at the same time, and get nastygrams from the compiler if they use XCode with the default settings.
NB: I work at Google now, so it's not like I've said any of the above out a misguided sense of company loyalty.
-- Terry