Remind me to never hire you to write a compiler, or any other kind of lexical parser for that matter.
Yes, it's nice that modern calculators will parse the parentheses for you, but if you don't know how to transform the equation into the precise evaluation sequence required, then you may understand the equation less well than you think.
RPN forces you to transform the equation into the proper evaluation steps, which is still a useful exercise. If nothing else, the practice you get will let you more easily understand that convoluted equation starting at you from the C++ source file.
And yes, before you toss out an easily-forseeable snide rejoinder, I do know how to use a slide rule.
16C - awesome calculator for programmers, especially embedded work. There is no better number system converter available at any price. [... ]
I've had one of these for -- can I say this? -- about 20 years. I think I changed the three button cells once in that time. The thing is still on my desk, and it still works. And you're right, the thing is great. I find the lack of scientific functions a bit of a drawback, though.
15C - same form factor as 16C. At the time HP's top scientific.
Yes. I wish I'd had the foresight to get one of these as well.
Out of curiosity, why do you not mention the HP 41-C/CV? A friend of mine gave me one as a gift recently, and it's still a darned fine piece of equipment.
Oh, please. Is that the legacy you want to leave? Is that how you want to be remembered, how you want your epitaph to appear in the history books: "I'm sorry, Senator, I don't recall?"
That may be good enough for some people, but it's not for me. And it damn well better not be good enough for the people designing a society's voting machines.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:
SECTION 1. Article 1.8 (commencing with Section 17529) is added to Chapter 1 of Part 3 of Division 7 of the Business and Professions
Code, to read:
Article 1.8. Restrictions On Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Advertisers
17529. The Legislature hereby finds and declares all of the
following:
(a) Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is comprised of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements (hereafter spam) and industry experts predict that by the end of 2003 half of all e-mail traffic will be comprised of spam. [emphasis mine]
The word "Spam" has been codified into law, and is now an official part of the legal lexicon.
Hormel are likely to be annoyed, and the Pythons are probably shaking their heads in utter bewilderment.
Keep laws off the internet, use technology to fix technology.
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you; the fewer poorly drafted laws, the better. However, in this case, the problem (mostly) isn't technological, it's sociological.
There are a surprising number of very broken people out there who live their day-to-day lives with the maxim, "If it's not expressly illegal, it's perfectly okay." This idea is, of course, hogwash, since it completely ignores unwritten social custom, which often varies regionally.
On the local region known as The Internet, it is the custom that it is impermissible to send unsolicited bulk email, particularly when it is commercial in nature. However, it is not, per se, illegal. So these sociopaths clog the network because, hey, it must be perfectly okay.
Normally, the counterbalancing force to such aberrant behavior is social ostracism or, in extreme cases, pillorying (or equivalent). Spammers are aware of this, and go to great lengths to conceal their identities and escape accountability.
While technical measures can thwart these people, such as widespread deployment of SMTP AUTH, it does nothing to fix the underlying sociopathy. Spammers are already deploying viruses and worms to create a network of open SMTP relays. Who here honestly believes they won't escalate into stealing SMTP AUTH passwords? Hence, spam is mostly a social problem, needing a mostly social solution.
I want the names of all the Diebold technical personnel involved with these machines so I can add them to our hiring blacklist.
Perhaps I've been living in an idyllic career vacuum, where everyone is competent and of good character -- and perhaps that's why I'm completely, jaw-droppingly astonished beyond words after reading Scoop's copy of the internal Diebold memos. With the possible exception of $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), I've never witnessed such opaque incompetence. These "engineers" not only don't know what they're doing, they clearly don't want to know what they're doing.
That whole "explanation" as to why a password on the database would be "pointless", since GEMS needs a password to add vote records... <*shaking head*> It's crystal-fscking-clear that they want an anonymous database user/account (the voter) that can only append records (votes) to the database; it must not be allowed to read or modify records. Read-only accounts are given to the vote counters and, if you really need to, a single strongly-passworded read-write account is given to the election commissioner. Once you establish these requirements, you then look for software that will do this for you. If MSAccess won't do it, junk it and move on. If no existing databases will do it, then My God, you're going to have to do some actual engineering!.
These idiots are trying to fudge the requirements because, apparently, they don't want to have to use any software they can't scoop up at Fry's (and, apparently, writing their own software is an anathema). I mean, yeah, their incompetence has placed the integrity of the Republic at risk, yadda yadda yadda, but am I the only person who sees their behavior as a kind of disinterested laziness? I can sort of understand people who are disinterested in the act of voting because the hiring roster has been stacked. But I mean, for God's sake, what kind of self-respecting person -- never mind software engineer -- would demonstrate such a profound lack of interest and respect in designing a fundamental instrument of democratic principles? If it were me, I'd be lying awake at night, worrying that I wasn't dilligent enough, wasn't smart enough to take on work of such profound importance. It would probably eat me alive, because any screw-up could be disasterous, because doing an excellent job would be so absolutely critical. But no, these guys are just phoning it in, tossing aside crucial security concerns with utterly stupid aphorisms such as, "Passwords actually don't matter much..."
Blacklist them. The software screwup you avoid may be your own.
If not, how much traffic do I have to send it to bring it to a crawl?:-)
Not much, I would think.
The C64 has a 1MHz 6510 8-bit CPU. The memory bus is also 1MHz. Moreover, the fastest instruction on the 6510 (which is a 6502 derivative) is two clocks. Thus, at four clocks per byte (two to read, two to write), the fastest data transfer rate you could conceivably get is 0.25 MBytes/second (in reality, it would be rather slower as the LDA and STA instructions take more than two clocks, but I don't have the timing chart in front of me).
The C64 does have DMA, but it's dedicated to video access and refresh and can't be redirected. Moreover, these DMA cycles completely take over the bus for 40 clocks every eight video lines. So your packet writes will likely hiccup from time to time. (Presumably they have big silos on the NIC.)
Even if the NIC did DMA itself, it would have to get out of video's way every eight lines, which means you couldn't flood the line indefinitely. Also, the C-64 has a mere -- surprise! -- 64K of RAM. At 1MByte/sec, you'd run out of RAM in 0.065536 seconds.
What is it that IM clients do that IRC can't? In other words, why do people bother with proprietary instant messaging systems when IRC (appears to) do the same things, plus a whole lot more?
Never never never never install drivers offered by Windoze Update. Unless the hardware vendor is Microsoft, they know exactly squat about how to write drivers for your hardware.
Always obtain device drivers from the hardware vendor themselves.
On the other hand, RealMYST had a mind-bogglingly beautiful realtime engine, even by today's standards
Yeah, but it was chunky as all hell. Certain scenes or viewing angles would reduce the game to little more than a slideshow.
This was especially true of the "extra" age in RealMyst, where you messed with the morphing crystals to get a projected image of Riven. Even though my machine was quite beefy for the time (dual 1GHz P3, 512M RAM, GeForce2 GTS w/64M RAM), it would always come to a grinding halt when entering that room.
In almost all other respects, however, RealMyst was lovely. I would fire up the Stoneship Age and stand on top of the rocks just to watch the never-ending storm.
There was a big fuss earlier this year about a settlement for a class-action suit for RIAA price-fixing. Everyone who signed up was supposed to get a check for $12.00 or so from the settlement.
Ted Nelson's ZigZag system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.
"Encryption features" does not imply a server requirement. Indeed, all of what is in MS's proposed feature set can be accomplished through intelligent deployment of OpenPGP-compliant encryption. No proprietary formats (or proprietary servers) necessary.
Obviously, encryption would require changes to the file format.
This is also incorrect. File format is orthogonal to encryption. Indeed, PGP and GnuPG can encrypt Word files today -- you don't need to wait for Microsoft's broken and incompatible implementation to get it.
Not to denigrate your efforts to set up your dad with a new machine, but my personal set of Best Practices includes checking for updates even for brand new machines/software.
This policy is wise even if you're simply installing a game. Bug fixes often come out within a month of first ship.
I recently acquired a new (to me) machine very cheap, which had Windows ME Harder installed. Once I verified it was working, I made a beeline to Windows Update and patched the sucker: Latest IE patches, latest Outlook hack^H^H^H^Hpatches, DirectX 9.0b... The whole shebang. I'll be installing Mozilla on it later tonight, and hiding the IE icon.
There's a reason the snide catch-phrase goes, "Outlook Virus of the Week." Checking for updates, even for new stuff, is never a bad idea.
Here's my lengthy editorial on the subject of shrinkwrap "licenses", and why they're pharmaceutically-pure bullshit. I'm disappointed to see that, in the years since I wrote it, the situation has gotten worse, not better.
Careful, though. As currently implemented, you can only sign the body, not the headers. Thus, someone can take a body you signed and forward it to someone else.
This is only a problem if:
The message is not intended to be read by others, and,
The subsequent recipient(s) look only at the GnuPG signature and don't check the headers.
So crypto is not a panacea. And you can be sure that future generations of virus/worm will send back a copy of your private keyring for cracking at their leisure. (You did generate a revocation certificate, didn't you?)
I am pretty sure from the history of the DeCSS controversy that whatever trade secret protection for DeCSS that existed was extinguished by the discovery and publishing of the DeCSS keys from the unencrypted Xing implementation. Thus, the reverse engineered discovery was entirely legal and entirely disolved whatever trade secret protection existed.
Except that DVD-CCA is claiming that the (ha ha) license "agreement" supersedes this. The EULA contained a clause to the effect of, "You will not attempt to discover trade secrets and, if you do, you agree to keep them secret." And that, of course, you must "agree" to the "license" before you can install and use the program.
This is, of course, pharmaceutically-pure bullshit.
Unfortunately, too many people are taking this kind of thing seriously. I still say the EFF, in addition to the First Amendment angle, should also be repudiating the, "license."
The next obvious stop is the Federal Circuit, which is where Constitutional matters such as Free Speech get decided.
Trade "secrets", once released into the retail marketplace, essentially cease to be so, since reverse-engineering is a legitimate practice, and always has been. License "agreements", which are a legal fiction anyway, do not change this fact. The idea that such compromised "secrets" can still trump Free Speech is ludicrous on its face.
Don't think for one nanosecond that this is over.
Oh, and to head off the foolish remarks ahead of time:
Copying is not theft, and never was.
Copying a thing is not the same as taking a thing. They are morally, economically, and legally distinct acts. Conflation of the two will merely confuse you and lead you to the wrong conclusions.
EULAs are bullshit.
See this editorial for a primer as to why you should view any such "agreement" as highly suspect.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons for getting at the raw data.
Merely because you can't think of a reason why anyone should examine the unencrypted data on DVDs doesn't mean good reasons don't exist (wacky screen blankers and realtime integration with video games are but two examples). Therefore, cutting off all access to that data shows a remarkably foolish lack of foresight; you have no idea what you'll be depriving yourself of later.
The Law is not the be-all end-all authority of moral behavior.
Merely chanting, "It's illegal!" will win you no new followers. There are plenty of foolish, self-serving laws on the books, and many others are violated on a daily basis without threat to the Republic. You must describe why you believe such illegality is a social benefit, not just for you, but for your audience as well.
"Property" cuts both ways.
Copyright extremists like to bleat that creators' rights should be protected, and that creators should have absolute control over their creations. Apart from the fact that this point of view is completely unrealistic, it also fails to take into account that, by virtue of having sold (not licensed) their goods in the retail marketplace, their "properties" are now subject to the whims of a new owner -- namely, the person who purchased it, and who may have very different ideas about what should and shouldn't be done with it. S/he is every bit the legitimate owner as the creator. So who calls the shots, and how do you justify that?
Never ever ever download driver updates from Windows Update. Always get them from the hardware vendor directly. There is no way Microsoft could know more about supporting a piece of hardware than the hardware vendor. So don't even bother.
Your analogy does not work. A proper one would state PacBell/BellSouth/Qwest refused to allow Uniden to manufacture phones that used their telephone lines to make a phone call.
You shoot yourself in the foot with this "correction" to the analogy. Uniden has the right to manufacture compatible telephone sets that can be hooked up to and place calls over PacBell/BellSouth/QWest's wires, and PacBell/BellSouth/QWest does not have the right to demand a license from Uniden to do this.
Reverse engineering a protocol is not the same as using a network without permission.
It sounds like you're conflating access with authorization. No one here is arguing that Microsoft doesn't have the right to authorize users of their network (through usernames and passwords). However, the access tool those users employ is not, and should not be, a restricted choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Remind me to never hire you to write a compiler, or any other kind of lexical parser for that matter.
Yes, it's nice that modern calculators will parse the parentheses for you, but if you don't know how to transform the equation into the precise evaluation sequence required, then you may understand the equation less well than you think.
RPN forces you to transform the equation into the proper evaluation steps, which is still a useful exercise. If nothing else, the practice you get will let you more easily understand that convoluted equation starting at you from the C++ source file.
And yes, before you toss out an easily-forseeable snide rejoinder, I do know how to use a slide rule.
Schwab
I've had one of these for -- can I say this? -- about 20 years. I think I changed the three button cells once in that time. The thing is still on my desk, and it still works. And you're right, the thing is great. I find the lack of scientific functions a bit of a drawback, though.
Yes. I wish I'd had the foresight to get one of these as well.
Out of curiosity, why do you not mention the HP 41-C/CV? A friend of mine gave me one as a gift recently, and it's still a darned fine piece of equipment.
Schwab
If you have a PalmPilot, you might consider RPN. Given your stated requirements, it may not be powerful enough, but it's served me well.
Schwab
Oh, please. Is that the legacy you want to leave? Is that how you want to be remembered, how you want your epitaph to appear in the history books: "I'm sorry, Senator, I don't recall?"
That may be good enough for some people, but it's not for me. And it damn well better not be good enough for the people designing a society's voting machines.
Schwab
The word "Spam" has been codified into law, and is now an official part of the legal lexicon.
Hormel are likely to be annoyed, and the Pythons are probably shaking their heads in utter bewilderment.
Schwab
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you; the fewer poorly drafted laws, the better. However, in this case, the problem (mostly) isn't technological, it's sociological.
There are a surprising number of very broken people out there who live their day-to-day lives with the maxim, "If it's not expressly illegal, it's perfectly okay." This idea is, of course, hogwash, since it completely ignores unwritten social custom, which often varies regionally.
On the local region known as The Internet, it is the custom that it is impermissible to send unsolicited bulk email, particularly when it is commercial in nature. However, it is not, per se, illegal. So these sociopaths clog the network because, hey, it must be perfectly okay.
Normally, the counterbalancing force to such aberrant behavior is social ostracism or, in extreme cases, pillorying (or equivalent). Spammers are aware of this, and go to great lengths to conceal their identities and escape accountability.
While technical measures can thwart these people, such as widespread deployment of SMTP AUTH, it does nothing to fix the underlying sociopathy. Spammers are already deploying viruses and worms to create a network of open SMTP relays. Who here honestly believes they won't escalate into stealing SMTP AUTH passwords? Hence, spam is mostly a social problem, needing a mostly social solution.
Schwab
I want the names of all the Diebold technical personnel involved with these machines so I can add them to our hiring blacklist.
Perhaps I've been living in an idyllic career vacuum, where everyone is competent and of good character -- and perhaps that's why I'm completely, jaw-droppingly astonished beyond words after reading Scoop's copy of the internal Diebold memos. With the possible exception of $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), I've never witnessed such opaque incompetence. These "engineers" not only don't know what they're doing, they clearly don't want to know what they're doing.
That whole "explanation" as to why a password on the database would be "pointless", since GEMS needs a password to add vote records... <*shaking head*> It's crystal-fscking-clear that they want an anonymous database user/account (the voter) that can only append records (votes) to the database; it must not be allowed to read or modify records. Read-only accounts are given to the vote counters and, if you really need to, a single strongly-passworded read-write account is given to the election commissioner. Once you establish these requirements, you then look for software that will do this for you. If MSAccess won't do it, junk it and move on. If no existing databases will do it, then My God, you're going to have to do some actual engineering! .
These idiots are trying to fudge the requirements because, apparently, they don't want to have to use any software they can't scoop up at Fry's (and, apparently, writing their own software is an anathema). I mean, yeah, their incompetence has placed the integrity of the Republic at risk, yadda yadda yadda, but am I the only person who sees their behavior as a kind of disinterested laziness? I can sort of understand people who are disinterested in the act of voting because the hiring roster has been stacked. But I mean, for God's sake, what kind of self-respecting person -- never mind software engineer -- would demonstrate such a profound lack of interest and respect in designing a fundamental instrument of democratic principles? If it were me, I'd be lying awake at night, worrying that I wasn't dilligent enough, wasn't smart enough to take on work of such profound importance. It would probably eat me alive, because any screw-up could be disasterous, because doing an excellent job would be so absolutely critical . But no, these guys are just phoning it in, tossing aside crucial security concerns with utterly stupid aphorisms such as, "Passwords actually don't matter much..."
Blacklist them. The software screwup you avoid may be your own.
Schwab
I just checked their Web site for "business-class" services. The best bandwidth they offer is 3500K down, 384K up.
...Excuse me? Business-class means servers. You can't serve $#!+ over 384Kbit. And for that they want roughly $155/month.
Shyeah, right. Come back when you can offer 1100K up minumum, and maybe we can have a conversation.
Schwab
Very happy Speakeasy.net customer
No. It can't.
Not much, I would think.
The C64 has a 1MHz 6510 8-bit CPU. The memory bus is also 1MHz. Moreover, the fastest instruction on the 6510 (which is a 6502 derivative) is two clocks. Thus, at four clocks per byte (two to read, two to write), the fastest data transfer rate you could conceivably get is 0.25 MBytes/second (in reality, it would be rather slower as the LDA and STA instructions take more than two clocks, but I don't have the timing chart in front of me).
The C64 does have DMA, but it's dedicated to video access and refresh and can't be redirected. Moreover, these DMA cycles completely take over the bus for 40 clocks every eight video lines. So your packet writes will likely hiccup from time to time. (Presumably they have big silos on the NIC.)
Even if the NIC did DMA itself, it would have to get out of video's way every eight lines, which means you couldn't flood the line indefinitely. Also, the C-64 has a mere -- surprise! -- 64K of RAM. At 1MByte/sec, you'd run out of RAM in 0.065536 seconds.
Schwab
C-64 Early Adopter
What is it that IM clients do that IRC can't? In other words, why do people bother with proprietary instant messaging systems when IRC (appears to) do the same things, plus a whole lot more?
Is it the graphical smileys? What?
Schwab
The same could be said of a hammer.
A tool by itself is nothing. Morality only enters the discussion when a person uses the tool.
Schwab
Never never never never install drivers offered by Windoze Update. Unless the hardware vendor is Microsoft, they know exactly squat about how to write drivers for your hardware.
Always obtain device drivers from the hardware vendor themselves.
Schwab
Evidently, as SCO have amply demonstrated, you can.
Schwab
Yeah, but it was chunky as all hell. Certain scenes or viewing angles would reduce the game to little more than a slideshow.
This was especially true of the "extra" age in RealMyst, where you messed with the morphing crystals to get a projected image of Riven. Even though my machine was quite beefy for the time (dual 1GHz P3, 512M RAM, GeForce2 GTS w/64M RAM), it would always come to a grinding halt when entering that room.
In almost all other respects, however, RealMyst was lovely. I would fire up the Stoneship Age and stand on top of the rocks just to watch the never-ending storm.
Schwab
There was a big fuss earlier this year about a settlement for a class-action suit for RIAA price-fixing. Everyone who signed up was supposed to get a check for $12.00 or so from the settlement.
Anyone seen their check yet?
Schwab
Ted Nelson's ZigZag system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.
Schwab
"Encryption features" does not imply a server requirement. Indeed, all of what is in MS's proposed feature set can be accomplished through intelligent deployment of OpenPGP-compliant encryption. No proprietary formats (or proprietary servers) necessary.
This is also incorrect. File format is orthogonal to encryption. Indeed, PGP and GnuPG can encrypt Word files today -- you don't need to wait for Microsoft's broken and incompatible implementation to get it.
Schwab
Not to denigrate your efforts to set up your dad with a new machine, but my personal set of Best Practices includes checking for updates even for brand new machines/software.
This policy is wise even if you're simply installing a game. Bug fixes often come out within a month of first ship.
I recently acquired a new (to me) machine very cheap, which had Windows ME Harder installed. Once I verified it was working, I made a beeline to Windows Update and patched the sucker: Latest IE patches, latest Outlook hack^H^H^H^Hpatches, DirectX 9.0b... The whole shebang. I'll be installing Mozilla on it later tonight, and hiding the IE icon.
There's a reason the snide catch-phrase goes, "Outlook Virus of the Week." Checking for updates, even for new stuff, is never a bad idea.
Schwab
Here's my lengthy editorial on the subject of shrinkwrap "licenses", and why they're pharmaceutically-pure bullshit. I'm disappointed to see that, in the years since I wrote it, the situation has gotten worse, not better.
Schwab
Careful, though. As currently implemented, you can only sign the body, not the headers. Thus, someone can take a body you signed and forward it to someone else.
This is only a problem if:
So crypto is not a panacea. And you can be sure that future generations of virus/worm will send back a copy of your private keyring for cracking at their leisure. (You did generate a revocation certificate, didn't you?)
Schwab
Or, conversely, now you can reduce a man to tears with the gift of a diamond.
Schwab
Except that DVD-CCA is claiming that the (ha ha) license "agreement" supersedes this. The EULA contained a clause to the effect of, "You will not attempt to discover trade secrets and, if you do, you agree to keep them secret." And that, of course, you must "agree" to the "license" before you can install and use the program.
This is, of course, pharmaceutically-pure bullshit.
Unfortunately, too many people are taking this kind of thing seriously. I still say the EFF, in addition to the First Amendment angle, should also be repudiating the, "license."
Schwab
The next obvious stop is the Federal Circuit, which is where Constitutional matters such as Free Speech get decided.
Trade "secrets", once released into the retail marketplace, essentially cease to be so, since reverse-engineering is a legitimate practice, and always has been. License "agreements", which are a legal fiction anyway, do not change this fact. The idea that such compromised "secrets" can still trump Free Speech is ludicrous on its face.
Don't think for one nanosecond that this is over.
Oh, and to head off the foolish remarks ahead of time:
Copying a thing is not the same as taking a thing. They are morally, economically, and legally distinct acts. Conflation of the two will merely confuse you and lead you to the wrong conclusions.
See this editorial for a primer as to why you should view any such "agreement" as highly suspect.
Merely because you can't think of a reason why anyone should examine the unencrypted data on DVDs doesn't mean good reasons don't exist (wacky screen blankers and realtime integration with video games are but two examples). Therefore, cutting off all access to that data shows a remarkably foolish lack of foresight; you have no idea what you'll be depriving yourself of later.
Merely chanting, "It's illegal!" will win you no new followers. There are plenty of foolish, self-serving laws on the books, and many others are violated on a daily basis without threat to the Republic. You must describe why you believe such illegality is a social benefit, not just for you, but for your audience as well.
Copyright extremists like to bleat that creators' rights should be protected, and that creators should have absolute control over their creations. Apart from the fact that this point of view is completely unrealistic, it also fails to take into account that, by virtue of having sold (not licensed) their goods in the retail marketplace, their "properties" are now subject to the whims of a new owner -- namely, the person who purchased it, and who may have very different ideas about what should and shouldn't be done with it. S/he is every bit the legitimate owner as the creator. So who calls the shots, and how do you justify that?
Schwab
You dope.
Never ever ever download driver updates from Windows Update. Always get them from the hardware vendor directly. There is no way Microsoft could know more about supporting a piece of hardware than the hardware vendor. So don't even bother.
Schwab
You shoot yourself in the foot with this "correction" to the analogy. Uniden has the right to manufacture compatible telephone sets that can be hooked up to and place calls over PacBell/BellSouth/QWest's wires, and PacBell/BellSouth/QWest does not have the right to demand a license from Uniden to do this.
It sounds like you're conflating access with authorization. No one here is arguing that Microsoft doesn't have the right to authorize users of their network (through usernames and passwords). However, the access tool those users employ is not, and should not be, a restricted choice.
Schwab