I echo these sentiments. I am also amazed at the amount of rationalizing being demonstrated in the comments.
It does not *MATTER* how bad the prof is. There is no legitimate excuse -- *NONE WHATSOEVER* for not doing your own work. Representing something as your own work when you did not make the effort to produce it is a *LIE*, and you deserve to *FAIL THE COURSE*, unequivocally. The professor in this example is probably doing two things: 1) Offering those who were on the fence about doing it and have balls enough to own up after the fact a chance at redemption, and 2) Reducing the burden of proof necessary to mitigate the problem; expelling the 1/3 that statistically were cheaters still risks including a few honest folks in the dragnet. Good for him on both counts.
The worst course I ever had was an undergrad class in Quantum Physics, for non-Physics engineering majors. The course was poorly timed because some of the math necessary had not yet been covered in the curriculum for the EE's among us. I had a professor I disliked, and purposefully planned my schedule to avoid each time we selected courses, but still ended up having for every physics course except for my first. I couldn't stand the guy. He was heavily into his research, and not at all interested in teaching undergrads. I even went with a friend once to his office for homework help (different class, Many-Particle Physics), and witnessed him throw down his pencil in disgust while stating that it was impossible to get any "real" work done when he was constantly being interrupted for trivial things like this. Anyway -- worst of the worst, in my opinion. In this Quantum Physics class, he was usually late to class, droned on in an unintelligible monotone for a while, dismissed us for a break in the middle of class for a snack, was usually late coming back from the break, then would drone on for a little while longer and dismiss class early. He assigned tons of homework which no one understood and few actually did. After a test near the end of the term, the *entire* class was failing. To mitigate this, he assigned as homework over the weekend that we were all to make up, work out, and hand in 4 physics problems covering the things we had done in class. He would then verify the work and assemble these into a binder to be placed into the library. Anyone in the class could present their ID and check out this notebook, but could not leave the library with it. We were free, however, to photocopy the contents. The *entire* final exam would be composed of problems from that notebook. If you studied and/or memorized the contents, you would see a subset of exactly the same problems on the final exam. The final exam grade would *be* your grade for the class, if it improved your grade at all. I did the assignment and handed in my work, but I never looked at that notebook. I considered it academic dishonesty, even if it was sanctioned. It just deepened my disgust for this guy. When exam time came, three of my four problems were on the exam. The exam only had seven problems. I received a 'C' in the course.
Later, after I had the math I needed under my belt, I went back and re-learned that stuff on my own. No, it has never been relevant to my job or anything else, but I considered even that 'C' to be tainted by the fact that 3 of the problems used were my own.
I don't see how you can have any self-respect if you never hold yourself to a standard.
My youngest daughter had pointed ears when she was born (as in Elf/Spock pointy). That went away over a few months. There's still the slightest suggestion of it (she is seven, now), but it definitely did change from what she was born with.
I was a beta tester for Multi-Ad Services in 1988/89, when they were first developing Multi-Ad Creator. I had a telephone number that I could call that let me talk directly to one of the engineers. Our Ad department was running this on Mac II's, under MacOS 6.x. We'd find repeatable ways of crashing things, or think of a nifty feature that we wanted, make a phone call, and usually would have a disk in the mail within a few *days* with the changes available for testing. There were a ton of features put into that product based on the direct recommendation of our small group, and we could almost immediately try out the changes and give feedback. Years later, I was at another location where they were using Ad Creator (an ancient version by this time), and they were having an issue that would only be addressable by adding a feature in the software. I called the number on the back of the box, on a whim. The person on the phone could not answer my question about whether newer versions had the feature I needed. I eventually got transferred to an engineering manager, described the feature, and was told that it did not exist, but he thought it was a great idea. He asked for contact information, and in a couple of weeks we had a set of disks with a beta version of the newest software, complete with the new feature. They gave me a new license and everything (the existing software was like 8 years old). The feature worked great.
Frame Technologies was very much the same sort of company, before Adobe consumed them, and I had similar experiences with them. I have two full versions of Frame that were sent to me in order to answer questions that their tech support didn't know how to answer, and their demo would not allow me to find out.
This ability was always there, for teams willing to pursue it. I could never say enough good things about working with those guys. Looks like the Ad Creator guys are still at it, you can download betas and provide feedback right from their web page.
I still have the book (very yellowed with age), and Grishnakh is right in his correction. The later ship arrives much more quickly than the seed ship did, due to scientists discovering the necessary mathematics and techniques for harnessing zero-point energy, allowing a much more massive ship to be built that does not need to carry so much fuel. This ship is able to take along living human colonists, unlike the seed ships which contained only enough genetic material for the machinery on board to produce and educate the first generation. The particular seed ship that colonizes Thalassa is also one where the decision was made to exclude historical topics of religious and racial conflict from the education of the seeded colonists. The 'ark' containing the later colonists, obviously, provided no such opportunity for sanitizing history. One of the sources of conflict in the novel is this meeting of two societies -- an older, cynical, more worldly new arrival interacting with the newer, Utopian, and idealistic one. Other points of interest are that the technology brought along by the seed ship on this mostly-oceanic planet has already been noticed, has been stolen, and is accelerating the development of a native aquatic species. This topic is left as a cliffhanger at the end of the novel. Another is that the finale of the book is a mutual celebration held by the two groups in the novel, with videos of earth-based life played for the enjoyment of the Thalassians, and a concert to entertain all. Musician Mike Oldfield wrote to Arthur C. Clarke, asking permission to compose a suite based on the concept of this concert finale. The resulting album is also called, "Songs of a Distant Earth", and features a liner note by Arthur C. Clarke. The CD release was one of the very first "Enhanced CDs", containing a short virtual-reality sequence and a simple musical puzzle one must solve in order to unlock the video to the composition, "Let There be Light". The VR sequence and parts of the video, I have read, was rendered using early versions of Mike's software project, MusicVR ( http://www.mikeoldfield.org/info/discography/mvr.htm ). I also recognize some of the video sequences I had seen demonstrated from that in the old "Beyond the Mind's Eye" videos. Mike has since spent 25M pounds developing the software and games around it. The games can be downloaded from the sidebar of his fan site ( http://tubular.net/ ). I've never looked at them; I don't run Windows and I don't play games, but I think it is interesting just the same. A final point of interest is that Clarke supposes several technologies in this novel that he has since become known for, including the space elevator, and ablative ice shields to protect the ships from erosion by space debris. Indeed, replacing this ice shield is the reason the later ship stops at Thalassia.
I always appreciated the Borland "Use this Software Like a Book" license. Make as many copies as needed, put it on as many computers as necessary, but use it like a book, in one place by one person at any point in time. It was a simple model and they built good stuff I did not mind paying for.
Off-topic, but fun: My best Borland experience was getting a short-term project to enhance some existing software written in Pascal around the "Borland Editor Toolkit". This product was basically an implementation of the text editor under the Borland IDE's (DOS), essentially a WordStar clone, written in Pascal with (some) source. Being an honest guy, I contacted Borland to see if I could still buy a copy, even though it had been out of production for several years. I did not feel right not having a legitimate copy of it, even though the owner of the software had supplied me with his "backup" copies. I eventually was put in touch with a VP at Borland who actually knew what I was talking about, and while he was on the phone he walked to some storage location and rummaged around and found a copy, still in shrinkwrap. He FedEx'd it to me for free.:-)
The most ludicrous (on multiple levels) I have had to deal with was an audit by one of our customers flagging our software for SQL injection, simply because the 'Defects Addressed' section of the release notes contained the text of an ODBC error administrators may have seen in the server log in prior releases, that had now been fixed. They would absolutely not allow the software into production until this 'critical vulnerability' in the static HTML release notes had been fixed. The scripts that spell-check our release notes now flag 'ODBC', and suggest that this acronym be replaced with the HTML numeric entities . This lets us pass the audit. I wonder how many real SQL injection vulnerabilities get passed over by this audit software because the output is encoded in some way?
I can't say I care for MySQL at all, but as long as there is *any* market share for it I expect Oracle to keep it around. I expected them to kill RDB when they bought it from DEC back in 1994 (thank you Bob Palmer for ruining a great company by selling it off, piecemeal), but it is still going strong: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/rdb/overview/index.html
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Thank you for your, as usual, rational observation.
Unix-derived OS's are only recently gaining proper fine-grained security controls, and most are still hacks, IMHO. Newer Linux has "capabilities" that allows one to mark a binary as allowed to use certain privileges, such as CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, but this can't be used with *scripts* due to the fact that it is the *interpreter* that would need the privilege (*bad* idea to always give it to the interpreter). Solaris 10 has user privileges such as net_privaddr, which is closer to the VMS way, but in my experience it is easier to get a customer to install a script that starts the web server as root than it is to get them to create a user for that specific purpose and type 'usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr webservd'. Often the customer admin'ing the box is just the most-technically-competent user, with the job dumped into his lap, rather than a "real" admin who understands that job. He's OK with things he's been asked to do before, and suspicious of anything he's never seen or does not understand. It's even difficult to get other developers to understand half of this stuff (tried unsuccessfully with ACL's a while back, for example, and they interact poorly enough with "standard" Unix file security to frustrate people with 30+ years Unix experience).
The other issue is a complete lack of consistency between Unix variants on how any of this stuff is enabled, configured, managed, or audited. Unless you have a lot of programming and testing resources at your disposal, developers need to limit themselves to those things they can rely on having as "standard" across the platforms supported. The company I work for supports 3 Unix variants, and tests on more than that. Even something as simple as querying directory services is a cross-platform mess, and security-related issues are a whole new weed patch. Of course, VMS did not have this issue to deal with, but that OS is at least consistent from top to bottom. Anytime I have to do anything security-related on Unix I cringe and wish I was working with VMS again (when will Unix get installed images? http://hoffmanlabs.org/vmsfaq/vmsfaq_007.html [AIX almost has this -- equivalent to/SHAREABLE] ).
Even VMS is not invulnerable. The last exploit I know of was verified in 2008.
Hrrrm. I've had a SyncML client on my iPhone for around 2 years now. I just checked the App Store and find at least 13 of them to choose from, ranging from free to around 15 bucks.
Actually, I should toss it off my phone. I haven't needed it since work switched us from Lotus Notes to Exchange (backward move in my opinion, Notes was rock-solid reliable, and indexing actually worked well).
Years ago (20-25?) I read an article in Radio Electronics magazine where they were artificially creating ball lightning. There were photographs. They had modified the electrical system of a diesel locomotive; basically put in a huge knife switch that would let them cut the current in an instant. The resulting arc would heat the interior up by several degrees instantly, and produce ball lightning that would bounce around the cab of the engine.
Never seen any myself, but Indiana isn't exactly a normal place to see it.
You are on/. , I don't think anyone of us has to worry about birth control.
Speak for yourself. I've been with my wife for 21+ years. She wasn't sure she wanted kids, so we used birth control for almost 5 years after we were married. She decided she wanted a baby; we stopped using birth control and she was pregnant in 3 weeks. We started using birth control again after the first baby was born, until she decided she wanted another 6 years later. It was kind of late in her cycle, so this time it took 5 weeks. She had a tubal during her cesarean, since she was near 40 and therefore considered herself too old to have any more kids. That was over seven years ago. If it weren't for that, we would *still* be using some other method of birth control, multiple times a week:-). And yes, I know they are both mine. They're *way* too much like me to belong to anyone else.
Have to agree here, though there are limits on the hours you can work. I started getting my first regular paycheck at age 12, working for a farmer castrating sheep, mending fences, and herding cattle and such. I started driving around that time too, since in Indiana you can drive without a license for farm work (at least you could then, I have not checked recently). I am 40 now, I've only been without a job for two weeks since I was 12. And thanks to Reagan, I started out working *below* minimum wage, since the laws were changed at that time so that employers did not have to honor minimum wage laws for under-age workers.
I would agree with this, from memory. I think the critique was accurate for many GNU projects at the time. I personally recall when one of the leaders of the GNUStep project, after having read the paper, decided it applied to GNUStep and that the project should change its behavior and open up more. IIRC, that was Scott Christley. I think it was the right decision, but too late. GNOME already had the bazaar model and consequently, the attention of both potential developers and GNU (which was not historically accustomed to such attention). I also personally know of one potential early GNUStep developer who dropped the project because of the closed development model prior to that change in policy. I am sure there were others. I can recall sending minor patches via email and never getting an acknowledgment or response. Back then, before kids and a house and all of those things, I could have contributed, but was discouraged by the lack of response. I had more luck with commercial companies before that time, getting suggested improvements into Multi-Ad Creator, FrameMaker, and the Borland Turbo Editor's Toolkit at various points.
Kind of an old meme. "Methinks he doth protest too much" (usual misquote). http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lady-doth-protest-too-much-methinks
A lot of us still do know how to find food that isn't in a grocery store. Don't forget that there are still populations that have had nearly zero contact with the "outside" in both South America and parts of Southeast Asia.
However, even if that were not the case, as a counterexample I grew up hunting, fishing, trapping, and growing and preparing my own food. I haven't lost those skills, and have passed a few of them down. My 14-year-old daughter keeps begging to go deer hunting with her bow. I told her that if I take her, she has to field dress her own deer and help with the butchering, which she has agreed to. I will probably take her next fall. She can already sharpen knives well enough to shave with, and I've taught her to cook and sew and how to build a fire successfully, etc.
I believe in knowing as many things as I can, from how to skin a rabbit to quantum mechanics. I grew up in a poor but hard-working family. Those survival skills were just everyday life; any money went to pay for gas, school books, etc. Food came from the river, ponds, woods, or garden and heat came from burning wood, which we spent all summer stacking and storing. I made my first 6-figure income this year and don't *have* to do those kinds of things anymore, but you don't forget your roots -- and I know that I am not the only one with a background like that.
And, yes, I have eaten things that would probably make *you* sick, but hunger will give you a cast-iron stomach.
I have to agree. I went to Germany a couple of years ago on a business trip. I don't eat lunch, so arrived outside the airport gate area well ahead of my coworkers who had spread out to buy lunch at various shops. I do not fly much, so had not been through the new security stuff since 9/11 before, and found things to be set up significantly differently than I had expected. It did not help that the airport was being remodeled so they had areas just roped off and the "sterile" area was out of sight behind some scaffolding covered in plastic sheets and things. I decided to hang out and wait for my coworkers before proceeding to the checkpoint, so kind of loitered around in the hallway, looking at some displays and things. They were significantly later than we had agreed as our meeting time, so I spent something like 20 minutes doing this, and kept leaning against a post and looking back along the hallway for them. It was getting pretty close to boarding time, and eventually I saw them hurrying along the hall a way back, so decided to go ahead and get in line. Evidently, my behavior to this point was "suspicious" enough to have caught somebody's attention, and I was immediately culled out of the line by some TSA guy in dark glasses that was way too full of himself. He played 21 questions with me, acting like he was pissed off at me the entire time and just generally being as much of a rude ass as he could make of himself. Finally, he asked for permission to search my baggage (there's only one right answer). He took my laptop out of its bag, signaled to two other TSA dudes to come over and detain me while he left, and was gone for about 15 minutes with the laptop. He returned eventually and gave it back to me, leaving me to stuff all of my things back into the bags myself, and giving me just barely enough time to get through to the "sterile" area before the plane began boarding. I am fortunate that there was nothing untoward on the laptop, which was a loaner from work since I had a desktop machine at the time and not a company-issued laptop. This machine was the retired offal of one of the sales/marketing guys, so it could have had anything on it. He was gone long enough, I always wondered if he imaged the machine. At any rate, to call me irritated is an understatement. I was certainly not impressed. While he had asked to see my identification in my wallet, as well as my passport, he never took anything out of the wallet. Take an old credit card some time and spend a few minutes with a good quality oil stone. You can make something just as sharp as any box cutter and much easier to hide. Do it along the bottom edge and you can keep it in your wallet along with your normal cards.
Comments about your username aside:-), iTunes certainly *does* sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts on Windows. It will also alternatively sync the built-in Windows Address Book (yes, there is one) if you've configured it that way, and also syncs photos to the Microsoft Picture Viewer or whatever it's called. What it won't do is do all of this if the device is configured to use MobileMe and Outlook is configured to use Exchange. Of course, there is Exchange support too, which the company I work for has started supporting but I haven't desired to configure yet. Anyway, I did use this syncing up until I purchased MobileMe, which latter service is useful enough that I am willing to put up with the issue. Our company has MobileMe blocked anyway, or at least parts of it (iDisk support), so I can only use it off-network anyway. Of course I had to buy third party software to successfully sync my two Kyocera Palm phones, and was never able to get the blasted Palm Treo to sync at all (how I loathed that phone, and Verizon for forcing me to switch to it after dumping support for my month-old Kyocera).
Comments are a form of redundancy, usually only figuratively, but sometimes for real.
I once was hired to rewrite some old code from the late 60's or early 70's from OCR'd screen dumps. The mainframe system it ran on had been taken off-line, and wasn't being brought back since the company gave early retirement to anyone who knew anything about it. There was a mix of COBOL, FORTRAN, SAS, JCL, etc. I was rewriting in C (mostly just the numerical stuff that had been written in FORTRAN). No one at the company understood what the code actually "did", but they wanted to duplicate the reports that it produced, exactly. I eventually did enough research to completely understand everything except for a single routine. It was all based on table lookups; tables that were generated based on mathematics derived by a researcher in Canada that were "unpublished." I could find several Bell Systems Journal articles that referenced this paper, but could not find the paper or the math anywhere. My sister in law, a research librarian, even located the author for me and I wrote to him, but he never replied. I knew there were problems with the data in the tables, from the obvious OCR errors like ones replaced with L's, zeros with D's, etc. I wanted to regenerate the tables myself (tables were being used for speed) in order to ensure they were accurate. Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and just use what I had. Fortunately, besides referencing the journal articles containing the original math the tables were generated from, the comment contained a complete commented out copy of a prior version of the function. Before it was moved to IBM hardware in the mid-70s, the original code ran on a CYBER something, and the FORTRAN compiler indexed and initialized multi-dimensional arrays in a different order. I wrote a Perl script to flip the entries in these arrays around to the "new" order, and compare table entries, marking any discrepancies. From the list of discrepancies, it was easy to determine what the OCR error patterns were, allowing me to derive the original table. I still felt uncomfortable, and eventually got the customer to get me a hard copy of the original screen dump used for the OCR process. I was able to verify my results from that.
The ultimate test was ensuring that input from the same data produced output that exactly matched the original output for the same data. This lead to finding and having to work around a bug in AIX's math libraries, but I eventually got there.
In doing that project, the original author's copious comments were *indispensable*.
The install DVD contains an application called "Remote Install Mac OS X", which will run on Mac OS X or Windows. You install that on a "partner" machine, and can then use the DVD drive from the partner machine remotely for the install. You also have the option of an external USB DVD drive.
The dropping of bombs on Japan almost certainly had multiple justifications, beyond impressing anyone. As far as anyone could know at the time, the Japanese were only months away from being able to deploy their own "weapons of mass destruction", in the form of biological weapons, against the United States. The weapons were already developed and had been tested on Korean and Chinese prisoners and civilians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ), killing as many as 400,000 people in China, and an estimated 580,000 people overall in the course of experiments. The only thing left to build was the weapons delivery platform. That platform had already been designed (the Fugaku, or "Mount Fuji" long-range bomber), but never went into production due to resources being concentrated towards building more fighters after the allies began gaining a foothold in the Pacific theater. Basically, everyone on every side was scrambling to obtain decisive weapons, and whoever got there first was going to use that capability, regardless.
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I echo these sentiments. I am also amazed at the amount of rationalizing being demonstrated in the comments.
It does not *MATTER* how bad the prof is. There is no legitimate excuse -- *NONE WHATSOEVER* for not doing your own work. Representing something as your own work when you did not make the effort to produce it is a *LIE*, and you deserve to *FAIL THE COURSE*, unequivocally. The professor in this example is probably doing two things: 1) Offering those who were on the fence about doing it and have balls enough to own up after the fact a chance at redemption, and 2) Reducing the burden of proof necessary to mitigate the problem; expelling the 1/3 that statistically were cheaters still risks including a few honest folks in the dragnet. Good for him on both counts.
The worst course I ever had was an undergrad class in Quantum Physics, for non-Physics engineering majors. The course was poorly timed because some of the math necessary had not yet been covered in the curriculum for the EE's among us. I had a professor I disliked, and purposefully planned my schedule to avoid each time we selected courses, but still ended up having for every physics course except for my first. I couldn't stand the guy. He was heavily into his research, and not at all interested in teaching undergrads. I even went with a friend once to his office for homework help (different class, Many-Particle Physics), and witnessed him throw down his pencil in disgust while stating that it was impossible to get any "real" work done when he was constantly being interrupted for trivial things like this. Anyway -- worst of the worst, in my opinion. In this Quantum Physics class, he was usually late to class, droned on in an unintelligible monotone for a while, dismissed us for a break in the middle of class for a snack, was usually late coming back from the break, then would drone on for a little while longer and dismiss class early. He assigned tons of homework which no one understood and few actually did. After a test near the end of the term, the *entire* class was failing. To mitigate this, he assigned as homework over the weekend that we were all to make up, work out, and hand in 4 physics problems covering the things we had done in class. He would then verify the work and assemble these into a binder to be placed into the library. Anyone in the class could present their ID and check out this notebook, but could not leave the library with it. We were free, however, to photocopy the contents. The *entire* final exam would be composed of problems from that notebook. If you studied and/or memorized the contents, you would see a subset of exactly the same problems on the final exam. The final exam grade would *be* your grade for the class, if it improved your grade at all. I did the assignment and handed in my work, but I never looked at that notebook. I considered it academic dishonesty, even if it was sanctioned. It just deepened my disgust for this guy. When exam time came, three of my four problems were on the exam. The exam only had seven problems. I received a 'C' in the course.
Later, after I had the math I needed under my belt, I went back and re-learned that stuff on my own. No, it has never been relevant to my job or anything else, but I considered even that 'C' to be tainted by the fact that 3 of the problems used were my own.
I don't see how you can have any self-respect if you never hold yourself to a standard.
My youngest daughter had pointed ears when she was born (as in Elf/Spock pointy). That went away over a few months. There's still the slightest suggestion of it (she is seven, now), but it definitely did change from what she was born with.
I was a beta tester for Multi-Ad Services in 1988/89, when they were first developing Multi-Ad Creator. I had a telephone number that I could call that let me talk directly to one of the engineers. Our Ad department was running this on Mac II's, under MacOS 6.x. We'd find repeatable ways of crashing things, or think of a nifty feature that we wanted, make a phone call, and usually would have a disk in the mail within a few *days* with the changes available for testing. There were a ton of features put into that product based on the direct recommendation of our small group, and we could almost immediately try out the changes and give feedback. Years later, I was at another location where they were using Ad Creator (an ancient version by this time), and they were having an issue that would only be addressable by adding a feature in the software. I called the number on the back of the box, on a whim. The person on the phone could not answer my question about whether newer versions had the feature I needed. I eventually got transferred to an engineering manager, described the feature, and was told that it did not exist, but he thought it was a great idea. He asked for contact information, and in a couple of weeks we had a set of disks with a beta version of the newest software, complete with the new feature. They gave me a new license and everything (the existing software was like 8 years old). The feature worked great.
Frame Technologies was very much the same sort of company, before Adobe consumed them, and I had similar experiences with them. I have two full versions of Frame that were sent to me in order to answer questions that their tech support didn't know how to answer, and their demo would not allow me to find out.
This ability was always there, for teams willing to pursue it. I could never say enough good things about working with those guys. Looks like the Ad Creator guys are still at it, you can download betas and provide feedback right from their web page.
I still have the book (very yellowed with age), and Grishnakh is right in his correction. The later ship arrives much more quickly than the seed ship did, due to scientists discovering the necessary mathematics and techniques for harnessing zero-point energy, allowing a much more massive ship to be built that does not need to carry so much fuel. This ship is able to take along living human colonists, unlike the seed ships which contained only enough genetic material for the machinery on board to produce and educate the first generation. The particular seed ship that colonizes Thalassa is also one where the decision was made to exclude historical topics of religious and racial conflict from the education of the seeded colonists. The 'ark' containing the later colonists, obviously, provided no such opportunity for sanitizing history. One of the sources of conflict in the novel is this meeting of two societies -- an older, cynical, more worldly new arrival interacting with the newer, Utopian, and idealistic one. Other points of interest are that the technology brought along by the seed ship on this mostly-oceanic planet has already been noticed, has been stolen, and is accelerating the development of a native aquatic species. This topic is left as a cliffhanger at the end of the novel. Another is that the finale of the book is a mutual celebration held by the two groups in the novel, with videos of earth-based life played for the enjoyment of the Thalassians, and a concert to entertain all. Musician Mike Oldfield wrote to Arthur C. Clarke, asking permission to compose a suite based on the concept of this concert finale. The resulting album is also called, "Songs of a Distant Earth", and features a liner note by Arthur C. Clarke. The CD release was one of the very first "Enhanced CDs", containing a short virtual-reality sequence and a simple musical puzzle one must solve in order to unlock the video to the composition, "Let There be Light". The VR sequence and parts of the video, I have read, was rendered using early versions of Mike's software project, MusicVR ( http://www.mikeoldfield.org/info/discography/mvr.htm ). I also recognize some of the video sequences I had seen demonstrated from that in the old "Beyond the Mind's Eye" videos. Mike has since spent 25M pounds developing the software and games around it. The games can be downloaded from the sidebar of his fan site ( http://tubular.net/ ). I've never looked at them; I don't run Windows and I don't play games, but I think it is interesting just the same. A final point of interest is that Clarke supposes several technologies in this novel that he has since become known for, including the space elevator, and ablative ice shields to protect the ships from erosion by space debris. Indeed, replacing this ice shield is the reason the later ship stops at Thalassia.
I always appreciated the Borland "Use this Software Like a Book" license. Make as many copies as needed, put it on as many computers as necessary, but use it like a book, in one place by one person at any point in time. It was a simple model and they built good stuff I did not mind paying for.
Off-topic, but fun: My best Borland experience was getting a short-term project to enhance some existing software written in Pascal around the "Borland Editor Toolkit". This product was basically an implementation of the text editor under the Borland IDE's (DOS), essentially a WordStar clone, written in Pascal with (some) source. Being an honest guy, I contacted Borland to see if I could still buy a copy, even though it had been out of production for several years. I did not feel right not having a legitimate copy of it, even though the owner of the software had supplied me with his "backup" copies. I eventually was put in touch with a VP at Borland who actually knew what I was talking about, and while he was on the phone he walked to some storage location and rummaged around and found a copy, still in shrinkwrap. He FedEx'd it to me for free. :-)
The most ludicrous (on multiple levels) I have had to deal with was an audit by one of our customers flagging our software for SQL injection, simply because the 'Defects Addressed' section of the release notes contained the text of an ODBC error administrators may have seen in the server log in prior releases, that had now been fixed. They would absolutely not allow the software into production until this 'critical vulnerability' in the static HTML release notes had been fixed. The scripts that spell-check our release notes now flag 'ODBC', and suggest that this acronym be replaced with the HTML numeric entities . This lets us pass the audit. I wonder how many real SQL injection vulnerabilities get passed over by this audit software because the output is encoded in some way?
I can't say I care for MySQL at all, but as long as there is *any* market share for it I expect Oracle to keep it around. I expected them to kill RDB when they bought it from DEC back in 1994 (thank you Bob Palmer for ruining a great company by selling it off, piecemeal), but it is still going strong: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/rdb/overview/index.html
It's called the "Unreasonable Man Paradox"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Thank you for your, as usual, rational observation.
Unix-derived OS's are only recently gaining proper fine-grained security controls, and most are still hacks, IMHO. Newer Linux has "capabilities" that allows one to mark a binary as allowed to use certain privileges, such as CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, but this can't be used with *scripts* due to the fact that it is the *interpreter* that would need the privilege (*bad* idea to always give it to the interpreter). Solaris 10 has user privileges such as net_privaddr, which is closer to the VMS way, but in my experience it is easier to get a customer to install a script that starts the web server as root than it is to get them to create a user for that specific purpose and type 'usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr webservd'. Often the customer admin'ing the box is just the most-technically-competent user, with the job dumped into his lap, rather than a "real" admin who understands that job. He's OK with things he's been asked to do before, and suspicious of anything he's never seen or does not understand. It's even difficult to get other developers to understand half of this stuff (tried unsuccessfully with ACL's a while back, for example, and they interact poorly enough with "standard" Unix file security to frustrate people with 30+ years Unix experience).
The other issue is a complete lack of consistency between Unix variants on how any of this stuff is enabled, configured, managed, or audited. Unless you have a lot of programming and testing resources at your disposal, developers need to limit themselves to those things they can rely on having as "standard" across the platforms supported. The company I work for supports 3 Unix variants, and tests on more than that. Even something as simple as querying directory services is a cross-platform mess, and security-related issues are a whole new weed patch. Of course, VMS did not have this issue to deal with, but that OS is at least consistent from top to bottom. Anytime I have to do anything security-related on Unix I cringe and wish I was working with VMS again (when will Unix get installed images? http://hoffmanlabs.org/vmsfaq/vmsfaq_007.html [AIX almost has this -- equivalent to /SHAREABLE] ).
Even VMS is not invulnerable. The last exploit I know of was verified in 2008.
Hrrrm. I've had a SyncML client on my iPhone for around 2 years now. I just checked the App Store and find at least 13 of them to choose from, ranging from free to around 15 bucks.
Actually, I should toss it off my phone. I haven't needed it since work switched us from Lotus Notes to Exchange (backward move in my opinion, Notes was rock-solid reliable, and indexing actually worked well).
Years ago (20-25?) I read an article in Radio Electronics magazine where they were artificially creating ball lightning. There were photographs. They had modified the electrical system of a diesel locomotive; basically put in a huge knife switch that would let them cut the current in an instant. The resulting arc would heat the interior up by several degrees instantly, and produce ball lightning that would bounce around the cab of the engine.
Never seen any myself, but Indiana isn't exactly a normal place to see it.
--Rubinstien
You are on /. , I don't think anyone of us has to worry about birth control.
Speak for yourself. I've been with my wife for 21+ years. She wasn't sure she wanted kids, so we used birth control for almost 5 years after we were married. She decided she wanted a baby; we stopped using birth control and she was pregnant in 3 weeks. We started using birth control again after the first baby was born, until she decided she wanted another 6 years later. It was kind of late in her cycle, so this time it took 5 weeks. She had a tubal during her cesarean, since she was near 40 and therefore considered herself too old to have any more kids. That was over seven years ago. If it weren't for that, we would *still* be using some other method of birth control, multiple times a week :-). And yes, I know they are both mine. They're *way* too much like me to belong to anyone else.
--Rubinstien
Have to agree here, though there are limits on the hours you can work. I started getting my first regular paycheck at age 12, working for a farmer castrating sheep, mending fences, and herding cattle and such. I started driving around that time too, since in Indiana you can drive without a license for farm work (at least you could then, I have not checked recently). I am 40 now, I've only been without a job for two weeks since I was 12. And thanks to Reagan, I started out working *below* minimum wage, since the laws were changed at that time so that employers did not have to honor minimum wage laws for under-age workers.
http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html
I would agree with this, from memory. I think the critique was accurate for many GNU projects at the time. I personally recall when one of the leaders of the GNUStep project, after having read the paper, decided it applied to GNUStep and that the project should change its behavior and open up more. IIRC, that was Scott Christley. I think it was the right decision, but too late. GNOME already had the bazaar model and consequently, the attention of both potential developers and GNU (which was not historically accustomed to such attention). I also personally know of one potential early GNUStep developer who dropped the project because of the closed development model prior to that change in policy. I am sure there were others. I can recall sending minor patches via email and never getting an acknowledgment or response. Back then, before kids and a house and all of those things, I could have contributed, but was discouraged by the lack of response. I had more luck with commercial companies before that time, getting suggested improvements into Multi-Ad Creator, FrameMaker, and the Borland Turbo Editor's Toolkit at various points.
Kind of an old meme. "Methinks he doth protest too much" (usual misquote). http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lady-doth-protest-too-much-methinks
A lot of us still do know how to find food that isn't in a grocery store. Don't forget that there are still populations that have had nearly zero contact with the "outside" in both South America and parts of Southeast Asia.
However, even if that were not the case, as a counterexample I grew up hunting, fishing, trapping, and growing and preparing my own food. I haven't lost those skills, and have passed a few of them down. My 14-year-old daughter keeps begging to go deer hunting with her bow. I told her that if I take her, she has to field dress her own deer and help with the butchering, which she has agreed to. I will probably take her next fall. She can already sharpen knives well enough to shave with, and I've taught her to cook and sew and how to build a fire successfully, etc.
I believe in knowing as many things as I can, from how to skin a rabbit to quantum mechanics. I grew up in a poor but hard-working family. Those survival skills were just everyday life; any money went to pay for gas, school books, etc. Food came from the river, ponds, woods, or garden and heat came from burning wood, which we spent all summer stacking and storing. I made my first 6-figure income this year and don't *have* to do those kinds of things anymore, but you don't forget your roots -- and I know that I am not the only one with a background like that.
And, yes, I have eaten things that would probably make *you* sick, but hunger will give you a cast-iron stomach.
I have to agree. I went to Germany a couple of years ago on a business trip. I don't eat lunch, so arrived outside the airport gate area well ahead of my coworkers who had spread out to buy lunch at various shops. I do not fly much, so had not been through the new security stuff since 9/11 before, and found things to be set up significantly differently than I had expected. It did not help that the airport was being remodeled so they had areas just roped off and the "sterile" area was out of sight behind some scaffolding covered in plastic sheets and things. I decided to hang out and wait for my coworkers before proceeding to the checkpoint, so kind of loitered around in the hallway, looking at some displays and things. They were significantly later than we had agreed as our meeting time, so I spent something like 20 minutes doing this, and kept leaning against a post and looking back along the hallway for them. It was getting pretty close to boarding time, and eventually I saw them hurrying along the hall a way back, so decided to go ahead and get in line. Evidently, my behavior to this point was "suspicious" enough to have caught somebody's attention, and I was immediately culled out of the line by some TSA guy in dark glasses that was way too full of himself. He played 21 questions with me, acting like he was pissed off at me the entire time and just generally being as much of a rude ass as he could make of himself. Finally, he asked for permission to search my baggage (there's only one right answer). He took my laptop out of its bag, signaled to two other TSA dudes to come over and detain me while he left, and was gone for about 15 minutes with the laptop. He returned eventually and gave it back to me, leaving me to stuff all of my things back into the bags myself, and giving me just barely enough time to get through to the "sterile" area before the plane began boarding. I am fortunate that there was nothing untoward on the laptop, which was a loaner from work since I had a desktop machine at the time and not a company-issued laptop. This machine was the retired offal of one of the sales/marketing guys, so it could have had anything on it. He was gone long enough, I always wondered if he imaged the machine. At any rate, to call me irritated is an understatement. I was certainly not impressed. While he had asked to see my identification in my wallet, as well as my passport, he never took anything out of the wallet. Take an old credit card some time and spend a few minutes with a good quality oil stone. You can make something just as sharp as any box cutter and much easier to hide. Do it along the bottom edge and you can keep it in your wallet along with your normal cards.
Comments about your username aside :-), iTunes certainly *does* sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts on Windows. It will also alternatively sync the built-in Windows Address Book (yes, there is one) if you've configured it that way, and also syncs photos to the Microsoft Picture Viewer or whatever it's called. What it won't do is do all of this if the device is configured to use MobileMe and Outlook is configured to use Exchange. Of course, there is Exchange support too, which the company I work for has started supporting but I haven't desired to configure yet. Anyway, I did use this syncing up until I purchased MobileMe, which latter service is useful enough that I am willing to put up with the issue. Our company has MobileMe blocked anyway, or at least parts of it (iDisk support), so I can only use it off-network anyway. Of course I had to buy third party software to successfully sync my two Kyocera Palm phones, and was never able to get the blasted Palm Treo to sync at all (how I loathed that phone, and Verizon for forcing me to switch to it after dumping support for my month-old Kyocera).
VCR Plus+ is essentially the same thing, in effect, and predates it by a couple of years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
Comments are a form of redundancy, usually only figuratively, but sometimes for real.
I once was hired to rewrite some old code from the late 60's or early 70's from OCR'd screen dumps. The mainframe system it ran on had been taken off-line, and wasn't being brought back since the company gave early retirement to anyone who knew anything about it. There was a mix of COBOL, FORTRAN, SAS, JCL, etc. I was rewriting in C (mostly just the numerical stuff that had been written in FORTRAN). No one at the company understood what the code actually "did", but they wanted to duplicate the reports that it produced, exactly. I eventually did enough research to completely understand everything except for a single routine. It was all based on table lookups; tables that were generated based on mathematics derived by a researcher in Canada that were "unpublished." I could find several Bell Systems Journal articles that referenced this paper, but could not find the paper or the math anywhere. My sister in law, a research librarian, even located the author for me and I wrote to him, but he never replied. I knew there were problems with the data in the tables, from the obvious OCR errors like ones replaced with L's, zeros with D's, etc. I wanted to regenerate the tables myself (tables were being used for speed) in order to ensure they were accurate. Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and just use what I had. Fortunately, besides referencing the journal articles containing the original math the tables were generated from, the comment contained a complete commented out copy of a prior version of the function. Before it was moved to IBM hardware in the mid-70s, the original code ran on a CYBER something, and the FORTRAN compiler indexed and initialized multi-dimensional arrays in a different order. I wrote a Perl script to flip the entries in these arrays around to the "new" order, and compare table entries, marking any discrepancies. From the list of discrepancies, it was easy to determine what the OCR error patterns were, allowing me to derive the original table. I still felt uncomfortable, and eventually got the customer to get me a hard copy of the original screen dump used for the OCR process. I was able to verify my results from that.
The ultimate test was ensuring that input from the same data produced output that exactly matched the original output for the same data. This lead to finding and having to work around a bug in AIX's math libraries, but I eventually got there.
In doing that project, the original author's copious comments were *indispensable*.
Me too. Hmm. Newton's Method with UID's?
Somebody should mod this AC up. Interesting, at least.
The install DVD contains an application called "Remote Install Mac OS X", which will run on Mac OS X or Windows. You install that on a "partner" machine, and can then use the DVD drive from the partner machine remotely for the install. You also have the option of an external USB DVD drive.
--Robert
The dropping of bombs on Japan almost certainly had multiple justifications, beyond impressing anyone. As far as anyone could know at the time, the Japanese were only months away from being able to deploy their own "weapons of mass destruction", in the form of biological weapons, against the United States. The weapons were already developed and had been tested on Korean and Chinese prisoners and civilians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ), killing as many as 400,000 people in China, and an estimated 580,000 people overall in the course of experiments. The only thing left to build was the weapons delivery platform. That platform had already been designed (the Fugaku, or "Mount Fuji" long-range bomber), but never went into production due to resources being concentrated towards building more fighters after the allies began gaining a foothold in the Pacific theater. Basically, everyone on every side was scrambling to obtain decisive weapons, and whoever got there first was going to use that capability, regardless.