As I think back on my childhood, I recall that in the early years of elementry school much of what we did in class were exercises designed to work the mind and teach logical reasoning. However, somewhere around 4th grade, the approach seemed to shift away from figuring things out toward rote memorization of facts. The problem with this is that, although it teaches the what and how of the world, it fails to instill an understanding of the why and when.
This method, unfortunately, creates people who are often ill equipped to handle real world situations. All too frequently, I encounter individuals who have learned to do their jobs by simple memorization of procedures, with little or no understanding of what they're actually doing. Step 1, step 2. If this thing happens, do that. This procedural approach is extremely efficient assuming no problems are encountered. However, problems always crop up, and without a solid understanding of the theory behind the task one is doing, solving those problems is next to impossible.
What's even more scary about this is the hostility it breeds towards "real" learning. I can think of several situations where I tried to get the people who work for me to learn more about the underlying aspects of their jobs, only to have them tell me they didn't want to learn theory -- they just wanted how-to instructions.
This is something that can be solved. However, doing so will require a radical change in people's thinking, and that's not something that happens overnight.
I don't mind when stories such as this one show up on Slashdot, because I use this site as (among other things) a meter by which to gauge whether or not the more traditional news is worth reading. I figure if it deserves my attention, it will show up here.
Do you understand Longhorn is pre-aplha? Obviously not.
So once all of the features are implemented for final release it will be three times bigger?
The World is Becomming More Trek-ish
on
Gas Goes Solid
·
· Score: 0
It seems to me that as time goes by, the world is becomming more and more like Star Trek. If I remember correctly (I'm too lazy to dig out my tech manual) the Enterprise D did something similar to this. They stored deuterium in a semi-frozen state and converted it upon use. In some cases they even used the slush fuel directly in fusion reactions.
The point made by the author can be generalized to any form of problem solving. When approaching a situation, you must first understand the problem before you can even begin to formulate an adequate solution. In my experience, this is the #1 thing that people do wrong in engineering (software or otherwise). Why just the other day, I was conversing with a collegue who was trying to decide between two ways of structuring a web application that would affect how the client used it. I asked him how the client currently does their business. He didn't know.
The first problem I see with this method is the lack of a powerful and flexible querying method. One of the most powerful features of SQL databases is their capability for searching. No where in the article did I see anthing about advanced querying of the objects. Even if there is, I'm sure its no where near as fast as a MySQL or Oracle. The author states that it is several orders of magnitude faster, but I bet it is this much faster only on fetch routines where you already know what object you are looking for.
As has been pointed out already, searching is not the goal of Prevayler -- storage and retrieval is. RDBMS' are very good at scanning through large data-sets, but they do so in a general-purpose manner. This is because they have no concept of the nature of the information.
An application I was working on recently required rapid searching through very massive sets of geographic data (without knowing what objects we were looking for). Due to political issues within the project, we were forced to implement a solution as quickly as possible. We turned to a traditional RDBMS solution. Even with considerable amounts of tweaking, indexing and other optimizations, performance was far from satisfactory. Unfortunately, we had to release the product in that state.
Later experimentation yielded a custom indexing algorithm with a 5000-fold increase in performance on hardware with half the clock speed and RAM. The reason was simple: Our custom solution was able to take into consideration the nature of the problem, whereas the RDBMS could only apply a general approach. Even when using hierarchical indexing (our data was hierarchical) the database couldn't even begin to keep up.
In the end, you have to decide what's important to the project. A database may provide lots of features, but its general nature may not be good enough for the task. Prevayler doesn't do everything, but then again I wouldn't necessarily want it to.:)
...any person who commits
any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:...
Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the
disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of
computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer
system, or computer network.
First of all, any competent software developer should know that arbitrarily writing to areas of a disk could potentially cause system failures. Just because the OS doesn't use a particular sector doesn't mean it's not used by something else. As the article indicated, there may be partition managers or security systems or any number of other things that use parts of a disk not normally occupied with useful information. Therefore, I don't think a developer could argue that they didn't know arbitrary disk writes could be damaging.
Unless a software program informs the user it might modify "unused" areas of the disk causing other things to stop working, and obtains their permission to do so, it would seem to me that any damage caused by said modifications would be punishable under California Penal Code 502. Whether or not this sort of law exists in other jurisdictions is another story.
My company recently switched from CVS to Subversion for all of its revision-control needs. By far the most difficult part of the transition was getting used to the idea of revision numbers being assigned to the whole repository, not to individual files. At first, the concept was alien to people, but once they understood a simple fact, it was a no brainer.
In any revision control system, whenever you commit a file-change you are affecting the entire repository. Even if you only modify a single file, you're still causing the state of the repository as a whole to shift. Therefore, it's only logical that revision numbers be tracked at the highest possible level.
As an analogy, suppose you kept a record of everytime you changed something in your car. Would you keep separate records for each part, or would you keep a single set for the entire vehicle? Most people would probably go with the latter as it makes the most sense. Regardless of what you change, whether you're replacing a single bolt or swapping out the entire engine, you're still making a modification to the car.
...before I've got the wife and the kids and the double mortgage...
Don't think those things are required elements in life. They're not. Be your own individual. Do what's best for you. After all, it's your life. If a wife and kids and a house with a white picket fence is what you really want, then by all means go for it. But don't do it just because one society (or even all societies) expect you to.
This world is very big with all kinds of people, places and ideas. Don't lock yourself into one way of doing things or one place of doing things. See the world, talk to people, take the knowledge and understanding from their experiences and add it to your own. Then make up your own mind. Otherwise, you're doomed to live someone else's life.
The problem is not finding an MD5 digest implementation. There are many packages to choose from. I settled on Cryptix. The problem is finding an MD5 UNIX password implementation -- that's quite different. The latter uses the former, but is not in fact the same thing.
I first got started with Servlets and JSPs back in the Apache JServ days before the specs had matured. At that time, things were rather klunky and needed significant work. I tried Tomcat a few months ago and was amazed at the vast improvement.
The first thing I noticed was the speed. Once compiled, servlets and JSPs ran noticeably faster than their mod_perl counterparts, on the same hardware. In addition, the structured development environment and cleanliness of Java (with respect to Perl) seriously streamlines the construction and rollout of apps.
The only thing I miss is CPAN. Perl has a vast archive of ready-made code libraries that do everything one could imagine. With Java, I was severely limited -- even having to roll-my-own UNIX-compatible MD5 password routines. However, given the improvement in overall development, I wouldn't switch back.
Hmm, last time I was in the UK, I had cameras staring at my ass all day.
We've got the same thing around here too. Every traffic intersection, office building, library, restaurant, shopping center, apartment building, you name it. Cameras are everywhere. We hope that most of them are privately monitored (many aren't), but whose to say if they really are.
In addition, the US has the most open form of Capitolism there is (the freedom to succeed, or fail, financially).
There are many other countries where these same market freedoms exist.
...our country does not have a state sponsored religion (as many European countries do).
As far as other countries in the world, whether it be in Africa, South America, Europe, or Asia. Nearly every single one limits the freedoms of its citizens. Be it through state sponsored healthcare, high taxation, unrealistic environmental laws, or by limiting the ability of its people to determine their own future by any means.
If you consider taxation over the lifetime of an individual or corporation, the United States has some of the highest rates in the world, especially if you're lucky enough to be successful. As for state-sponsored religion or industry, you're forgetting that in many areas the government competes with the private sector. It's not always a one-or-the-other kind of arrangement.
And finally in a world where money rules, America has economic superiority over all countries.
This is quite subjective. There are many who would disagree.
There are so many people on this planet with vastly different ideals and notions of what's important. In the grand scheme of things, no country or government system is necessarily better or worse than any other. They're just different.
No offence(sic), but, we live in the BEST fucking country in the world.
A rather subjective statement. Not everyone believes this to be true.
We have more freedom, more opportunity than anyone else.
Do you know this for a fact or are you simply repeating what you've heard? Why not give prokofiev a list of these freedoms and opportunities and have him/her compare it to what's available in the U.K. I'm sure you'll be quite surprised. My girlfriend said almost those exact words to me once. She never said it again after I gave her a list of countries where those same freedoms are available.
I'm just curious how they detected his wireless usage.
I too am curious. There are two ways I see this could be set up (maybe more???):
NAT - Provider would not be able to distinguish between traffic originating from the router and that passing through it.
Static IPs - Provider would not be able to distinguish between traffic originating from a wireless node or one hardwired into the LAN.
Even if a wireless network were to be set up, the service provider has no way of knowing who is using it. They would not be able to distinguish between traffic from the legitimate customer and that from outsiders.
When we talk about God, we are not talking about a specific religion. God is not unique to Christianity.
That argument is irrelevant. As has been pointed out many times before (even in the text of yesterday's decision) the problem isn't which god is referred to but the fact that ANY god is referred to. No matter how you look at it, the Pledge of Allegiance professes a belief in a deity. Which one is academic.
The government is supposed to remain neutral in matters of religious faith. Several court decisions have upheld this notion. Since there are large numbers of people who believe there is no god of any kind, the only way to remain neutral on the subject is to make no mention of it. This in no way prevents anyone from believing or practicing what they wish. If someone needs state sponsorship of their faith to feel comfortable, it sounds to me like their beliefs wern't too stable to begin with.
I am inclined to agree. I was always taught that loyalty was earned, never owed. Yet for some unexplained reason we're supposed to be loyal to this country simply because we're citizens. Just once I'd like to hear an explanation that doesn't also hold true in other parts of the world.
These are the tools I use the most. While UML is not that difficult, getting managers to use the Unified Method is like pulling teeth. First of all, you have to clue them into the fact that UML and the Unified Method are NOT THE SAME THING. Second, an iterative approach to development always looks more costly at the outset. Fortunately, many development teams already use an iterative method without even realizing it.
There's more than one way to get a job done, however. Never lock yourself into a single way of doing things. Use the Unified Method as a guide for developing your own procedures (which it how it was intended anyway).
"Under that agreement, SonicBlue claims the right to destroy your device when you connect for updates."
I don't know the internals of the ReplayTV system, but it seems to me that if an independent update program could be written to run on a *nix box, it could download updates from SonicBlue and serve them to your ReplayTV units. Essentially, it would pretend to be a ReplayTV unit when talking to SonicBlue, and would pretend to be SonicBlue when talking to a ReplayTV unit. Possible?
I agree with the author that capturing the initial imagery in a digital medium creates a lot more possibilities, both good and bad. However, my own feelings on HDCAM vs. film are more asthetic than political.
I've seen both Ep 1 and Ep 2 in the theater, and the one big difference that stood out in my mind was significantly less color saturation in Ep 2. Both films have a lot of color, but Episode 1 really popped. The colors in some scenes looked almost painted. I didn't see that once in Episode 2, even though there were similar shots. Now this may be due to a production decision -- different color palettes, etc. Based on my discussions with cinematographers however, the #1 complaint I hear about HDCAM vs. film is less saturation... and it makes sense.
It's well known that current CCDs don't have the same exposure latitude as film, both in overall brightness and color depth. Granted they could have corrected this in post before going to film, but it looks like they didn't. There were even a couple of scenes where things almost starting looking like a news report for a few seconds.
24 FPS progressive scanning goes a long way towards making video look like film, but until they get better exposure on CCDs (and figure out how to do good high-speed photography) I don't think they're quite there yet.
Granted, you have a point about social engineering. However, the general concept behind smart card technology is to create a "key" that is unusable by anyone other than its rightful owner. This can be done using PINs, biometric data, etc. Anybody can make duplicates of the card, but forging a person's memories or retinal patterns is more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
This method, unfortunately, creates people who are often ill equipped to handle real world situations. All too frequently, I encounter individuals who have learned to do their jobs by simple memorization of procedures, with little or no understanding of what they're actually doing. Step 1, step 2. If this thing happens, do that. This procedural approach is extremely efficient assuming no problems are encountered. However, problems always crop up, and without a solid understanding of the theory behind the task one is doing, solving those problems is next to impossible.
What's even more scary about this is the hostility it breeds towards "real" learning. I can think of several situations where I tried to get the people who work for me to learn more about the underlying aspects of their jobs, only to have them tell me they didn't want to learn theory -- they just wanted how-to instructions.
This is something that can be solved. However, doing so will require a radical change in people's thinking, and that's not something that happens overnight.
I don't mind when stories such as this one show up on Slashdot, because I use this site as (among other things) a meter by which to gauge whether or not the more traditional news is worth reading. I figure if it deserves my attention, it will show up here.
What's so new about this? I read about this years ago. I'd post it if I could remember where.
So once all of the features are implemented for final release it will be three times bigger?
It seems to me that as time goes by, the world is becomming more and more like Star Trek. If I remember correctly (I'm too lazy to dig out my tech manual) the Enterprise D did something similar to this. They stored deuterium in a semi-frozen state and converted it upon use. In some cases they even used the slush fuel directly in fusion reactions.
God, I'm a geek! :P
The point made by the author can be generalized to any form of problem solving. When approaching a situation, you must first understand the problem before you can even begin to formulate an adequate solution. In my experience, this is the #1 thing that people do wrong in engineering (software or otherwise). Why just the other day, I was conversing with a collegue who was trying to decide between two ways of structuring a web application that would affect how the client used it. I asked him how the client currently does their business. He didn't know.
As has been pointed out already, searching is not the goal of Prevayler -- storage and retrieval is. RDBMS' are very good at scanning through large data-sets, but they do so in a general-purpose manner. This is because they have no concept of the nature of the information.
An application I was working on recently required rapid searching through very massive sets of geographic data (without knowing what objects we were looking for). Due to political issues within the project, we were forced to implement a solution as quickly as possible. We turned to a traditional RDBMS solution. Even with considerable amounts of tweaking, indexing and other optimizations, performance was far from satisfactory. Unfortunately, we had to release the product in that state.
Later experimentation yielded a custom indexing algorithm with a 5000-fold increase in performance on hardware with half the clock speed and RAM. The reason was simple: Our custom solution was able to take into consideration the nature of the problem, whereas the RDBMS could only apply a general approach. Even when using hierarchical indexing (our data was hierarchical) the database couldn't even begin to keep up.
In the end, you have to decide what's important to the project. A database may provide lots of features, but its general nature may not be good enough for the task. Prevayler doesn't do everything, but then again I wouldn't necessarily want it to. :)
State of California Penal Code 502, Paragraph C
...any person who commits
any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:...
First of all, any competent software developer should know that arbitrarily writing to areas of a disk could potentially cause system failures. Just because the OS doesn't use a particular sector doesn't mean it's not used by something else. As the article indicated, there may be partition managers or security systems or any number of other things that use parts of a disk not normally occupied with useful information. Therefore, I don't think a developer could argue that they didn't know arbitrary disk writes could be damaging.Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
Unless a software program informs the user it might modify "unused" areas of the disk causing other things to stop working, and obtains their permission to do so, it would seem to me that any damage caused by said modifications would be punishable under California Penal Code 502. Whether or not this sort of law exists in other jurisdictions is another story.
In any revision control system, whenever you commit a file-change you are affecting the entire repository. Even if you only modify a single file, you're still causing the state of the repository as a whole to shift. Therefore, it's only logical that revision numbers be tracked at the highest possible level.
As an analogy, suppose you kept a record of everytime you changed something in your car. Would you keep separate records for each part, or would you keep a single set for the entire vehicle? Most people would probably go with the latter as it makes the most sense. Regardless of what you change, whether you're replacing a single bolt or swapping out the entire engine, you're still making a modification to the car.
- Buddy, you've screwed the poochie.
- Buddy, you've screwed the poochie again.
- Buddy, that poochie ain't gonna like you in the morning.
- That poor, poor poochie.
- Danger Will Robinson, one of your nodes is about to fall off.
- You're fucked!
Can't say that I ever actually saw these errors happen, but they're in there.Don't think those things are required elements in life. They're not. Be your own individual. Do what's best for you. After all, it's your life. If a wife and kids and a house with a white picket fence is what you really want, then by all means go for it. But don't do it just because one society (or even all societies) expect you to.
This world is very big with all kinds of people, places and ideas. Don't lock yourself into one way of doing things or one place of doing things. See the world, talk to people, take the knowledge and understanding from their experiences and add it to your own. Then make up your own mind. Otherwise, you're doomed to live someone else's life.
The problem is not finding an MD5 digest implementation. There are many packages to choose from. I settled on Cryptix. The problem is finding an MD5 UNIX password implementation -- that's quite different. The latter uses the former, but is not in fact the same thing.
The first thing I noticed was the speed. Once compiled, servlets and JSPs ran noticeably faster than their mod_perl counterparts, on the same hardware. In addition, the structured development environment and cleanliness of Java (with respect to Perl) seriously streamlines the construction and rollout of apps.
The only thing I miss is CPAN. Perl has a vast archive of ready-made code libraries that do everything one could imagine. With Java, I was severely limited -- even having to roll-my-own UNIX-compatible MD5 password routines. However, given the improvement in overall development, I wouldn't switch back.
We've got the same thing around here too. Every traffic intersection, office building, library, restaurant, shopping center, apartment building, you name it. Cameras are everywhere. We hope that most of them are privately monitored (many aren't), but whose to say if they really are.
In addition, the US has the most open form of Capitolism there is (the freedom to succeed, or fail, financially).
There are many other countries where these same market freedoms exist.
As far as other countries in the world, whether it be in Africa, South America, Europe, or Asia. Nearly every single one limits the freedoms of its citizens. Be it through state sponsored healthcare, high taxation, unrealistic environmental laws, or by limiting the ability of its people to determine their own future by any means.
If you consider taxation over the lifetime of an individual or corporation, the United States has some of the highest rates in the world, especially if you're lucky enough to be successful. As for state-sponsored religion or industry, you're forgetting that in many areas the government competes with the private sector. It's not always a one-or-the-other kind of arrangement.
And finally in a world where money rules, America has economic superiority over all countries.
This is quite subjective. There are many who would disagree.
There are so many people on this planet with vastly different ideals and notions of what's important. In the grand scheme of things, no country or government system is necessarily better or worse than any other. They're just different.
A rather subjective statement. Not everyone believes this to be true.
We have more freedom, more opportunity than anyone else.
Do you know this for a fact or are you simply repeating what you've heard? Why not give prokofiev a list of these freedoms and opportunities and have him/her compare it to what's available in the U.K. I'm sure you'll be quite surprised. My girlfriend said almost those exact words to me once. She never said it again after I gave her a list of countries where those same freedoms are available.
I too am curious. There are two ways I see this could be set up (maybe more???):
- NAT - Provider would not be able to distinguish between traffic originating from the router and that passing through it.
- Static IPs - Provider would not be able to distinguish between traffic originating from a wireless node or one hardwired into the LAN.
Even if a wireless network were to be set up, the service provider has no way of knowing who is using it. They would not be able to distinguish between traffic from the legitimate customer and that from outsiders.That argument is irrelevant. As has been pointed out many times before (even in the text of yesterday's decision) the problem isn't which god is referred to but the fact that ANY god is referred to. No matter how you look at it, the Pledge of Allegiance professes a belief in a deity. Which one is academic.
The government is supposed to remain neutral in matters of religious faith. Several court decisions have upheld this notion. Since there are large numbers of people who believe there is no god of any kind, the only way to remain neutral on the subject is to make no mention of it. This in no way prevents anyone from believing or practicing what they wish. If someone needs state sponsorship of their faith to feel comfortable, it sounds to me like their beliefs wern't too stable to begin with.
I am inclined to agree. I was always taught that loyalty was earned, never owed. Yet for some unexplained reason we're supposed to be loyal to this country simply because we're citizens. Just once I'd like to hear an explanation that doesn't also hold true in other parts of the world.
Give me a break.
There's more than one way to get a job done, however. Never lock yourself into a single way of doing things. Use the Unified Method as a guide for developing your own procedures (which it how it was intended anyway).
I don't know the internals of the ReplayTV system, but it seems to me that if an independent update program could be written to run on a *nix box, it could download updates from SonicBlue and serve them to your ReplayTV units. Essentially, it would pretend to be a ReplayTV unit when talking to SonicBlue, and would pretend to be SonicBlue when talking to a ReplayTV unit. Possible?
I've seen both Ep 1 and Ep 2 in the theater, and the one big difference that stood out in my mind was significantly less color saturation in Ep 2. Both films have a lot of color, but Episode 1 really popped. The colors in some scenes looked almost painted. I didn't see that once in Episode 2, even though there were similar shots. Now this may be due to a production decision -- different color palettes, etc. Based on my discussions with cinematographers however, the #1 complaint I hear about HDCAM vs. film is less saturation ... and it makes sense.
It's well known that current CCDs don't have the same exposure latitude as film, both in overall brightness and color depth. Granted they could have corrected this in post before going to film, but it looks like they didn't. There were even a couple of scenes where things almost starting looking like a news report for a few seconds.
24 FPS progressive scanning goes a long way towards making video look like film, but until they get better exposure on CCDs (and figure out how to do good high-speed photography) I don't think they're quite there yet.
It may be entirely psychological, but I feel much more relaxed when I use an ergo keyboard. I also seem to be able to type much faster.
Granted, you have a point about social engineering. However, the general concept behind smart card technology is to create a "key" that is unusable by anyone other than its rightful owner. This can be done using PINs, biometric data, etc. Anybody can make duplicates of the card, but forging a person's memories or retinal patterns is more difficult.