A lot could still be added to Perl. I remember Larry (or someone else from the core Perl dev group) saying that many people now want Perl to be more of an "orthogonal" language -- one that is built around a central idea, like functions in SML, or objects in Smalltalk, or lists in LISP -- whereas Perl was designed as the diagonal language, that integrates features of many languages can be bent to any of the paradigms out there (even if it's not best at it).
I like this "diagonality" and I see this as the direction Perl should go. There's still quite a few programming language paradigms that haven't been "integrated" into Perl.
It's a really nice client, as proprietary ones go. What sold me on it is that it was (as of 1.5 years ago) the only IM software that supported messaging over HTTP proxies. It comes for Linux and Java, too. And you can easily turn off the ad banner. What I don't like about it is that it sometimes drops messages, without any warnings (but then AFAIK all IM clients do).
I guess it's enough to just never turn it off, and when you're not physically close, run a screensaver lock. While not guaranteed to work against everything (but what is?) it's rather doubtful that trying to patch such a device on wires of a running computer wouldn't create a system lockup, at the very least. In such event, when you come back and see your system rebooted or locked up, you know something has been wrong and you can examine your drivers, weigh your computer and so on (in the order of increasing paranoia)
> Why You Should Use Encryption
On the other hand, you might read the Brin's book, "Transparent Society", on why everybody should have a right to spy on everybody else. Or read his essays on this topic at www.kithrup.com
Now let's see: a day has 86400 seconds. Let's limit that to daytime hours only, say 50k seconds. 100k hits in that time makes 2 hits per second, on average. If Dell claims that's the limit of their hardware, well, my Atari 800XL would be faster as a Web server.
OK, I know that a hit and a hit don't necessarily mean the same thing... but speak to your boss and let him just apply some common sense here.
Leaving all ideology aside, from a purely utilitarian POV, five bucks would a small price to pay if Napster
* made its service more reliable, including a less buggy client, configurable timeouts and most of all restartable file transfer
* created a better search engine, removing the 100 files limit on search results and generally treating MP3 names and ID3 tags with more intelligence
Now the ideology side: since the advent of MP3 (about 2 years ago on my personal timescale) I didn't buy a single CD (not that I ever been a big CD collector). So there's something nagging me in the back of my mind, even though I'm definitely not buying into the hype that copying == stealing. On the other hand, I've been going to concerts more often recently, so I have some basis for rationalizations:-)
On the gripping hand, how much of their supposed RIAA settlement money is actually going to end up in the artists' pockets??
>Damn right. I propose that the link to >Moody's "editorial" be removed from the story... >why should we do this bastard the favor of >slashdotting his pile of BS?
Because then everybody will go to the ABC site anyway, only to get at the story they will have to sift through many more ad-infested sites.
When/. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
I live in continental Europe where we have this wonderful provision in our constitutions: the court may not request anybody to testify against himself or herself, i.e. to provide self-incriminating evidence. I believe this is in fact a standard in the E.U. law philosophy.
I'm not sure whether Great Britain has any formal constitution at all but the law requiring citizens to reveal their encryption keys seems to me to encroach on this fundamental right of a citizen. Perhaps someone can enlighten me in this matter?
OTOH, it's not all that surprising in a country where 500-year old precedents are still law.
The answer might be collaborative moderation (as opposed to the simple one we have at Slashdot). In the cooperative moderation system, a post (or whatever) is not assigned a one-dimensional number, but is rated by each user and then for a given user, it's rating is an average of ratings of people who have a similar rating history . Works like a charm: see Alexandria Literature for an example, and Amazon's recommendation system has been ripped off them too. With enough users, however, it's really straining the computing resources (but then why do we have all this iron faster every year?)
I don't like the karma system. (One obvious reason is that I don't post often cause I'm no karma whore and I only post when I have something to say, and I haven't got the +2 bonus and so this post won't be even read by enough people). Fsck the karma whores!
>>It might be factorable by an unknown prime >>smaller than the larger known prime;
>Go back and read his proof. Just near the start, >he places the assumption that all primes up to >the largest known prime.
That's right - I missed it. I thought his post declared that we only know the largest prime, not necessarily all the primes up to it.
Anyway,
>What's more, this is a safe assumption because if >a prime is known, all numbers smaller can then be >checked for primeness.
But this is your own completely unwarranted assumption. Try checking all the numbers up to 2^234567-1, or whatever the current largest is. Which is precisely why I am talking about computing times.
>1) It's exceedingly useful in pure mathematics to >know that an infinitude of primes exists,
>2) the point of this proof was to prove that, so >I think he has succeeded admirably
Actually, it was one of the ancient Greeks, can't remember which one, who succeeded admirably on that. The point being that there's nothing useful in quoting a proof that a) has been known for 2500 years b) has been quoted a few times before in this discussion c) everyone has been learning about in Number Theory 101.
>>Let's toy with the idea that there may actually >>be a largest possibly known prime.
>There is a largest known prime. And it is >definitely known, not just possibly.
Now, sir, I'd recommend the brain-growing exercise for you (I'm told yeast does it). I'm speaking here of a largest possibly known prime in the sense that:
a) it may be possible to prove that it's impossible to find any prime beyond a certain number by any means other than the brute force of e.g. Eratosthenes' Sieve. Admittedly, it's not very likely, but that's why I'm saying "Let's toy with the idea".
b) in which case, computation times have a lot to do about whether the prime is actually the largest possible or not.
>The rest of your post seems to be degenerate >drivel which talks about computing times (what >have they got to do with anything?)
Well, read up about how the primes are being found nowadays? If you think that computation has nothing to do with proofs in contemporary mathematics, I suggest that you read up on the theorem about coloring the map with only four colors.
>I don't think anyone here would be stupid enough >to say that there are not a finite, fixed number >of primes in a given finite range. (for example, >between 1 and largest-known-prime), even if we >don't know what they are yet.
But it may, just may still be impossible to find them all. See above.
PS. How about getting a life instead of spewing insults around?
Case 2: M is not prime, but isn't factorable by any known prime. Therefore it is factorable by some unknown prime larger than all known primes. Untrue. It might be factorable by an unknown prime smaller than the larger known prime; there may exist such primes (and do now). So your proof is erroneus and anyway doesn't prove anything useful (that there is an infinite number of primes has been known for quite a while, heh). Let's toy with the idea that there may actually be a largest possibly known prime. Of course, if we knew such a prime, it would be theoretically possible to examine all the numbers smaller than it for being a prime, and according to the Euclidean disproof construct the next prime, but such operation might involve checking so many numbers that it would not be computable with the resources available in the universe. Of course, there are smarter ways than that to do it and this is why we are still finding new primes, even though the currently known largest primes are far into the realm of incomputable using e.g. the Eratosthenes' sieve.
OK, I never liked McCartney anyway. I don't like his music, but that of course says nothing, everybody can have his or her own tastes and it's impossible to tell which music is better.
But one thing that really got to me was when I heard him in an interview a few years ago denouncing John Lennon as a second-rater and claiming that all that was original in The Beatles' music came from him.
DOH. John Lennon has been dead for 20 years now and can't really answer. So is it really surprising what he's doing now?
Remember how we laughed on various net-clueless movies like The System? How improbable the sale of illegal software seemed in Matrix?
The SDMI protection software can be reverse-engineered like any software distributed to a hardware near you. This means that utilities to convert the downloaded music to freely copyable MP3's will be created. Will it be illegal? You bet it will, if DeCSS is any indication where the matters are heading.
Somehow, now I have no problems imagining going to the hacker's den and paying him a couple hundred for a diskette with such a ripper.
Instead of a futurologist (you know that if you put a million futurologists at typewriters, one will finally write a correct prognosis?) go read one of these SF authors to inspire your imagination even more:
* Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age" - he's the novelist extraordinaire of the geek crowd, for those who have been hiding in a hole for the last 10 years or so * Rudy Rucker, "Hardware", "Software", "Freeware" and I think he also wrote "Wetware"; highly entertaining * anything by Stanislaw Lem, who wrote about all these things 30 years ago * David Zindell's "Neverness" * Iain M. Banks's Culture novels - "Consider Phlebas", "Use of Weapons", "Player of Games", "Excession"
The whole CNN story details the awful consequences that await you if you "hack your way through the codes meant to protect the products from downloading" (clueless, ain't it?) It presents NO arguments for the other side, it just describes the might of the recording companies who go for the boy, his father and everybody else in the freaking universe. I'm not normally paranoid, but this story might be a part of the same campaign it describes. Remember what CNN is and who it belongs to. Go figure.
To all the people who propose that Red Hat acquires all those great companies -- let me remind you that the shareholders of the latter don't necessarily view Red Hat's stock as a currency as good as as cash, because it's so obviously inflated. Quite simply, they might not be willing to sell for Red Hat's stock because it may tomorrow be worth a tenth of today's value.
I did not spring "chasing the taillights" as a FUD. I seriously believe it is a potential problem that Linux does not have (and I can't see how CAN it have, considering its open source nature) at least ONE compelling feature unique to it and with which it enjoys a lead over other OS-es. A gimmick to lead the unwashed masses to Linux on the desktop. Reliability might be considered such a feature, but I doubt it's important enough (and it's NOT good enough on the high-end, as Jon himself admits). Perhaps portability is in fact another such feature, as no other OS has been demonstrably so moldable to fit any architecture on existence.
Jon is correct of course that a lot of today's progress is just implementing the ideas for which the minefield had been cleared with earlier systems. But I don't think he addresses my main point: - and now flame me for spreading FUD again - there's no conscious direction in Linux development, it's rather the attitude "we'll have all the cool stuff that all other OS-es have". Technically, it's very sound. But one compelling feature (or program layer or whatever you religiously believe is appropriate name for fancy stuff accompanying the kernel) would help in converting the masses, if not the PHB's.
Linux, and in general the Open Source development model, has been accused in the past of "chasing the taillights" -- of always catching up to features that other commercial programs have, because they are results of vision rather than of a creeping evolution.
Myself, I think there may be something in this view, when I look e.g. at the emerging UI input methods like voice recognition and pen input/handwriting recognition on the client side, and various goodies on the server side.
Do you agree with this? If so, is Linux condemned to always be a few steps behind of the current state of the art of OS design, at least as far as features go?
If not, what examples of vision and features unique to Linux would you provide as examples?
It's hard not to agree that Apache probably runs on sites of - on average! - lesser significance and traffic than the sites which run commercial web servers, simply because it's free (as in beer) and as such it's the default choice for budget-limited people. Therefore the Netcraft survey doesn't show the whole picture.
Would it be feasible perhaps to get a hack on a few routers running some gateway or backbone, and count the number of actually sent HTTP headers from each server? This statistics would be much more accurate; it would actually show how much data is moved around the net and how many total user requests are served by each of the servers.
Is anybody doing this? I remember there was an inflammatory article a few months ago when one of the network monitoring companies counted browser id strings in this manner and found out that Linux browsers were only used in 0.25% of all requests passed through the routers it monitored.
I suspect the picture might not be so rosy as Netcraft paints it. But hey, it's better not to underestimate the opponent.
Factual correction: Auschwitz, the concentration camp in the Polish city of Oswiecim, was NOT formed in 1939. The first transport of Jews headed for Auschwitz was shipped from Tarnow on July 14, 1940.
I store them in a text file:-) the catch is, I encrypt the file with PGP. Any time I decrypt it for reference I am careful not to leave the unencrypted file around, too.
My password generating tactic is to use the first letters of a phrase that is meaningful to me. Let's say I like Vengaboys, especially their catchy line "Boom boom boom boom I want you in my room", which generates the password "bbbbiwyimr". Or "4biwyimr" if you have to have numbers in your password.
Note 1: don't use phrases that are meaningful to you but to many other people too. Crackers have them in their dictionaries. So don't use "to be or not to be", nor "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"; I had the latter actually guessed by the dictionary cracker run by my sysadmin once. Don't use common proverbs etc.
Note 2: as an additional criterion I apply the speed of typing the password on a keyboard. Believe me, I guessed many passwords looking at people's hands and would not rather have it done to me.
Honestly, why does it matter if there are 1 or 2 keys? OK, so MS created another key and gave it to the NSA, then lied about it. How is this situation different than if they created only one key and simply shared it with NSA? And, of course, lied about it?
We don't have the source, so the question boils down to whether we can trust the provider, not how many keys they might make.
Just an aside - this is the same Fred Moody who wrote The charge of the Linux brigade . I have read some of his other past articles in the archive and ROTFLMAO-ed a few times. The guy made some hilarious predictions and sniped at will at the Unix/Netscape/Open Source crowd, positioning himself almost always with Microsoft.
So think what you will about the Solow's paradox (I don't know what to think, frankly, because I don't know anything about the methodology with which the productivity data is gathered) but don't take this guy's opinion seriously.
Two problems with VERN: * crashes, sometimes, and when it does it's impossible to get back to the apps open in the other desktops than the one that was on top at the time of crash * hangs up whenever and app hangs up - makes it unusable if e.g. some client database app can't get locks.
So I've tried VERN and I've been impressed by its versatility, but I'd rather scroll thru the task bar than have to kill my apps when VERN hangs up.
Re:Some of that book's thinking is simplistic
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
For these people who are in favor of the Atkins diet - I am sure it works beautifully with them. But dieting means, by definition, inflicting some painful restraint on oneself. I found it much less painful to eat less of everything (and exercise) than to deny myself sweet foods completely (yes I had tried Atkins too). What would life be without a cheesecake, even if you eat it only once a month? After 2 weeks of Atkins, I even felt like I would kill for simple bread.
In fact I support John's diet, but think he did not put enough emphasis on exercise and building muscles along as you shed fat. By all means, maintain a 500cals deficit as the book recommends. But let it be a 2500 intake and 3000 expense, as you go to the gym or swimming pool and indulge in a solid chicken breast (with a small icecream wafer) afterwards, instead of 1500 out of 2000 if you sit all day and burn cals just to heat yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot could still be added to Perl. I remember Larry (or someone else from the core Perl dev group) saying that many people now want Perl to be more of an "orthogonal" language -- one that is built around a central idea, like functions in SML, or objects in Smalltalk, or lists in LISP -- whereas Perl was designed as the diagonal language, that integrates features of many languages can be bent to any of the paradigms out there (even if it's not best at it).
I like this "diagonality" and I see this as the direction Perl should go. There's still quite a few programming language paradigms that haven't been "integrated" into Perl.
It's a really nice client, as proprietary ones go. What sold me on it is that it was (as of 1.5 years ago) the only IM software that supported messaging over HTTP proxies. It comes for Linux and Java, too. And you can easily turn off the ad banner. What I don't like about it is that it sometimes drops messages, without any warnings (but then AFAIK all IM clients do).
> do you keep your laptop in a safe at night?
I guess it's enough to just never turn it off, and when you're not physically close, run a screensaver lock. While not guaranteed to work against everything (but what is?) it's rather doubtful that trying to patch such a device on wires of a running computer wouldn't create a system lockup, at the very least. In such event, when you come back and see your system rebooted or locked up, you know something has been wrong and you can examine your drivers, weigh your computer and so on (in the order of increasing paranoia)
> Why You Should Use Encryption
On the other hand, you might read the Brin's book, "Transparent Society", on why everybody should have a right to spy on everybody else. Or read his essays on this topic at www.kithrup.com
Now let's see: a day has 86400 seconds. Let's limit that to daytime hours only, say 50k seconds. 100k hits in that time makes 2 hits per second, on average. If Dell claims that's the limit of their hardware, well, my Atari 800XL would be faster as a Web server.
OK, I know that a hit and a hit don't necessarily mean the same thing... but speak to your boss and let him just apply some common sense here.
* made its service more reliable, including a less buggy client, configurable timeouts and most of all restartable file transfer
* created a better search engine, removing the 100 files limit on search results and generally treating MP3 names and ID3 tags with more intelligence
Now the ideology side: since the advent of MP3 (about 2 years ago on my personal timescale) I didn't buy a single CD (not that I ever been a big CD collector). So there's something nagging me in the back of my mind, even though I'm definitely not buying into the hype that copying == stealing. On the other hand, I've been going to concerts more often recently, so I have some basis for rationalizations :-)
On the gripping hand, how much of their supposed RIAA settlement money is actually going to end up in the artists' pockets??
>Damn right. I propose that the link to
/. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
>Moody's "editorial" be removed from the story...
>why should we do this bastard the favor of
>slashdotting his pile of BS?
Because then everybody will go to the ABC site anyway, only to get at the story they will have to sift through many more ad-infested sites.
When
I live in continental Europe where we have this wonderful provision in our constitutions: the court may not request anybody to testify against himself or herself, i.e. to provide self-incriminating evidence. I believe this is in fact a standard in the E.U. law philosophy.
I'm not sure whether Great Britain has any formal constitution at all but the law requiring citizens to reveal their encryption keys seems to me to encroach on this fundamental right of a citizen. Perhaps someone can enlighten me in this matter?
OTOH, it's not all that surprising in a country where 500-year old precedents are still law.
I don't like the karma system. (One obvious reason is that I don't post often cause I'm no karma whore and I only post when I have something to say, and I haven't got the +2 bonus and so this post won't be even read by enough people). Fsck the karma whores!
>>It might be factorable by an unknown prime
>>smaller than the larger known prime;
>Go back and read his proof. Just near the start,
>he places the assumption that all primes up to
>the largest known prime.
That's right - I missed it. I thought his post declared that we only know the largest prime, not necessarily all the primes up to it.
Anyway,
>What's more, this is a safe assumption because if
>a prime is known, all numbers smaller can then be
>checked for primeness.
But this is your own completely unwarranted assumption. Try checking all the numbers up to 2^234567-1, or whatever the current largest is. Which is precisely why I am talking about computing times.
>1) It's exceedingly useful in pure mathematics to
>know that an infinitude of primes exists,
>2) the point of this proof was to prove that, so
>I think he has succeeded admirably
Actually, it was one of the ancient Greeks, can't remember which one, who succeeded admirably on that. The point being that there's nothing useful in quoting a proof that a) has been known for 2500 years b) has been quoted a few times before in this discussion c) everyone has been learning about in Number Theory 101.
>>Let's toy with the idea that there may actually
>>be a largest possibly known prime.
>There is a largest known prime. And it is
>definitely known, not just possibly.
Now, sir, I'd recommend the brain-growing exercise for you (I'm told yeast does it). I'm speaking here of a largest possibly known prime in the sense that:
a) it may be possible to prove that it's impossible to find any prime beyond a certain number by any means other than the brute force of e.g. Eratosthenes' Sieve. Admittedly, it's not very likely, but that's why I'm saying "Let's toy with the idea".
b) in which case, computation times have a lot to do about whether the prime is actually the largest possible or not.
>The rest of your post seems to be degenerate
>drivel which talks about computing times (what
>have they got to do with anything?)
Well, read up about how the primes are being found nowadays? If you think that computation has nothing to do with proofs in contemporary mathematics, I suggest that you read up on the theorem about coloring the map with only four colors.
>I don't think anyone here would be stupid enough
>to say that there are not a finite, fixed number
>of primes in a given finite range. (for example,
>between 1 and largest-known-prime), even if we
>don't know what they are yet.
But it may, just may still be impossible to find them all. See above.
PS. How about getting a life instead of spewing insults around?
Case 2: M is not prime, but isn't factorable by any known prime. Therefore it is factorable by some unknown prime larger than all known primes. Untrue. It might be factorable by an unknown prime smaller than the larger known prime; there may exist such primes (and do now). So your proof is erroneus and anyway doesn't prove anything useful (that there is an infinite number of primes has been known for quite a while, heh). Let's toy with the idea that there may actually be a largest possibly known prime. Of course, if we knew such a prime, it would be theoretically possible to examine all the numbers smaller than it for being a prime, and according to the Euclidean disproof construct the next prime, but such operation might involve checking so many numbers that it would not be computable with the resources available in the universe. Of course, there are smarter ways than that to do it and this is why we are still finding new primes, even though the currently known largest primes are far into the realm of incomputable using e.g. the Eratosthenes' sieve.
OK, I never liked McCartney anyway. I don't like his music, but that of course says nothing, everybody can have his or her own tastes and it's impossible to tell which music is better.
But one thing that really got to me was when I heard him in an interview a few years ago denouncing John Lennon as a second-rater and claiming that all that was original in The Beatles' music came from him.
DOH. John Lennon has been dead for 20 years now and can't really answer. So is it really surprising what he's doing now?
Remember how we laughed on various net-clueless movies like The System? How improbable the sale of illegal software seemed in Matrix?
The SDMI protection software can be reverse-engineered like any software distributed to a hardware near you. This means that utilities to convert the downloaded music to freely copyable MP3's will be created. Will it be illegal? You bet it will, if DeCSS is any indication where the matters are heading.
Somehow, now I have no problems imagining going to the hacker's den and paying him a couple hundred for a diskette with such a ripper.
Instead of a futurologist (you know that if you put a million futurologists at typewriters, one will finally write a correct prognosis?) go read one of these SF authors to inspire your imagination even more:
* Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age" - he's the novelist extraordinaire of the geek crowd, for those who have been hiding in a hole for the last 10 years or so
* Rudy Rucker, "Hardware", "Software", "Freeware" and I think he also wrote "Wetware"; highly entertaining
* anything by Stanislaw Lem, who wrote about all these things 30 years ago
* David Zindell's "Neverness"
* Iain M. Banks's Culture novels - "Consider Phlebas", "Use of Weapons", "Player of Games", "Excession"
The whole CNN story details the awful consequences that await you if you "hack your way through the codes meant to protect the products from downloading" (clueless, ain't it?) It presents NO arguments for the other side, it just describes the might of the recording companies who go for the boy, his father and everybody else in the freaking universe. I'm not normally paranoid, but this story might be a part of the same campaign it describes. Remember what CNN is and who it belongs to. Go figure.
To all the people who propose that Red Hat acquires all those great companies -- let me remind you that the shareholders of the latter don't necessarily view Red Hat's stock as a currency as good as as cash, because it's so obviously inflated. Quite simply, they might not be willing to sell for Red Hat's stock because it may tomorrow be worth a tenth of today's value.
I did not spring "chasing the taillights" as a FUD. I seriously believe it is a potential problem that Linux does not have (and I can't see how CAN it have, considering its open source nature) at least ONE compelling feature unique to it and with which it enjoys a lead over other OS-es. A gimmick to lead the unwashed masses to Linux on the desktop. Reliability might be considered such a feature, but I doubt it's important enough (and it's NOT good enough on the high-end, as Jon himself admits). Perhaps portability is in fact another such feature, as no other OS has been demonstrably so moldable to fit any architecture on existence.
Jon is correct of course that a lot of today's progress is just implementing the ideas for which the minefield had been cleared with earlier systems. But I don't think he addresses my main point: - and now flame me for spreading FUD again - there's no conscious direction in Linux development, it's rather the attitude "we'll have all the cool stuff that all other OS-es have". Technically, it's very sound. But one compelling feature (or program layer or whatever you religiously believe is appropriate name for fancy stuff accompanying the kernel) would help in converting the masses, if not the PHB's.
Linux, and in general the Open Source development model, has been accused in the past of "chasing the taillights" -- of always catching up to features that other commercial programs have, because they are results of vision rather than of a creeping evolution.
Myself, I think there may be something in this view, when I look e.g. at the emerging UI input methods like voice recognition and pen input/handwriting recognition on the client side, and various goodies on the server side.
Do you agree with this? If so, is Linux condemned to always be a few steps behind of the current state of the art of OS design, at least as far as features go?
If not, what examples of vision and features unique to Linux would you provide as examples?
It's hard not to agree that Apache probably runs on sites of - on average! - lesser significance and traffic than the sites which run commercial web servers, simply because it's free (as in beer) and as such it's the default choice for budget-limited people. Therefore the Netcraft survey doesn't show the whole picture.
Would it be feasible perhaps to get a hack on a few routers running some gateway or backbone, and count the number of actually sent HTTP headers from each server? This statistics would be much more accurate; it would actually show how much data is moved around the net and how many total user requests are served by each of the servers.
Is anybody doing this? I remember there was an inflammatory article a few months ago when one of the network monitoring companies counted browser id strings in this manner and found out that Linux browsers were only used in 0.25% of all requests passed through the routers it monitored.
I suspect the picture might not be so rosy as Netcraft paints it. But hey, it's better not to underestimate the opponent.
Factual correction: Auschwitz, the concentration camp in the Polish city of Oswiecim, was NOT formed in 1939. The first transport of Jews headed for Auschwitz was shipped from Tarnow on July 14, 1940.
The classical text is Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation", it has a followup work too the title of which evades me at the moment.
For a fictional perspective try "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson and "Aristoi" by Walter Jon Williams.
I store them in a text file :-) the catch is, I encrypt the file with PGP. Any time I decrypt it for reference I am careful not to leave the unencrypted file around, too.
My password generating tactic is to use the first letters of a phrase that is meaningful to me. Let's say I like Vengaboys, especially their catchy line "Boom boom boom boom I want you in my room", which generates the password "bbbbiwyimr". Or "4biwyimr" if you have to have numbers in your password.
Note 1: don't use phrases that are meaningful to you but to many other people too. Crackers have them in their dictionaries. So don't use "to be or not to be", nor "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"; I had the latter actually guessed by the dictionary cracker run by my sysadmin once. Don't use common proverbs etc.
Note 2: as an additional criterion I apply the speed of typing the password on a keyboard. Believe me, I guessed many passwords looking at people's hands and would not rather have it done to me.
Honestly, why does it matter if there are 1 or 2 keys? OK, so MS created another key and gave it to the NSA, then lied about it. How is this situation different than if they created only one key and simply shared it with NSA? And, of course, lied about it?
We don't have the source, so the question boils down to whether we can trust the provider, not how many keys they might make.
So think what you will about the Solow's paradox (I don't know what to think, frankly, because I don't know anything about the methodology with which the productivity data is gathered) but don't take this guy's opinion seriously.
Two problems with VERN:
* crashes, sometimes, and when it does it's impossible to get back to the apps open in the other desktops than the one that was on top at the time of crash
* hangs up whenever and app hangs up - makes it unusable if e.g. some client database app can't get locks.
So I've tried VERN and I've been impressed by its versatility, but I'd rather scroll thru the task bar than have to kill my apps when VERN hangs up.
For these people who are in favor of the Atkins diet - I am sure it works beautifully with them. But dieting means, by definition, inflicting some painful restraint on oneself. I found it much less painful to eat less of everything (and exercise) than to deny myself sweet foods completely (yes I had tried Atkins too). What would life be without a cheesecake, even if you eat it only once a month? After 2 weeks of Atkins, I even felt like I would kill for simple bread.
In fact I support John's diet, but think he did not put enough emphasis on exercise and building muscles along as you shed fat. By all means, maintain a 500cals deficit as the book recommends. But let it be a 2500 intake and 3000 expense, as you go to the gym or swimming pool and indulge in a solid chicken breast (with a small icecream wafer) afterwards, instead of 1500 out of 2000 if you sit all day and burn cals just to heat yourself.