Many people even say 'a visa' instead of the correct singular 'a visum' (visa is also plural). However, most people don't realize this to be incorrect.
So they are constantly charging you for things you don't use? I think such a mode of billing not only rips you off, it encourages wastefulness in off-peak times (because everything is 'free' unless you stay below-peak).
Just throw a pile of integrated circuits on the
living room floor with a manual and leave them
alone with it for a while. Usualy, they will come
to your home office after 15 minutes asking you
"Mummy, what's a tri-state?"
Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'....
That's almost a flamebait in the original post,
because it's so utterly unprincipled, ineffective
and inefficient.
Ineffective: Most importantly, it doesn't actually search
a term index, but you can only search for
file names (so you have to know already what
you're searching for). There is no good desktop
search tool for UNIX that I'm aware of (although
I've used SWISH-E to index plain text document collections, but that's still different from a tool intended to index whole directory trees
for full-text search.
Inefficient: The find/locate commands don't use an index. People below have proposed updatedb, but I doubt that uses incremental index updating, which can become essential if you run it once per night on a large machine. Full-text indexing is
much more resource intensive than just indexing
file names, so you want to be even more sure
that when tomorrows cron job starts, today's
will have finished.
Unprincipled: You could actually find a
pipeline of UNIX system commands that implement
full-text indexing and search, but that's not
a good way to do it. I am aware of the power
and versatility of the pipe paradigm, but search
is such a fundamental (pervasive, important)
problem that it licenses a dedicated development.
Ideally, there'd be a search engine
which is part of
the operating system, and Microsoft has recognised
this and has been working on it for quite some
time now. It will be a major selling point of Longhorn, and I predict it will dramatically
enhance Windows usability compared to Linux.
Unfortunately, the open source community has not recognised the
problem as a whole, but I'm aware the people
on the ReiserFS file system have ambitious
future plans to include features in that
direction (but that might come too late), and
I wouldn't count on the likes of Yahoo/Google
to deliver the ultimate UNIX/Linux search solution.
--
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People fight over water, food and natural resources.
When our resources get scarce, we go to war over them.
In managing our resources, and in sustainable development,
we plant the seeds of peace.
-- Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Price)
The first order of business for an energy consumer should be to minimize energy consumption.
This previous post deserves to be modded up
for containing this sentence.
Yes, please consider this advice, fellow
geeks: how many monitors are always on even when
they're not used for hours? And who pays attention
to buying energy-efficient servers? Green PCs with power-saving modes? Recently left on the light when
you weren't in the room for hours? Do you drive
a car that needs more gas than the state of the art per 100 km? You don't even know how much your car needs?
If only more people had constant awareness of such issues, and taught their children to treat
energy as something precious that must never
be wasted, then this might have a higher impact
than technical advancement in engergy effectiveness.
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MPs are outraged, and the EU may investigate why no mandatory
It's nice to see that cross-national EU procedures seem to be in place to monitor these kinds of worrying development. It shows that the EU is not
(just) about bureaucracy and 'being ruled from
Brussels' as my British friends like to put it,
but actually an effective means to watch
what all its member governments are doing.
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Coolbeans! The Nuggets, SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web, now all across the UK.
And as for Europe declaring war on the US (with what, a very limited nuclear arsenal compared to the massive US stockpile?)
Exactly. The US have piled up tons of VX nerve gas, and chemical/atomic weapons (yes, WMD by
any definition) and THAT is wasting taxpayers'
money, IMHO, not launching another GPS service.
Some things have to be done multiple times to
learn and incrementally improve the technology.
It's good not to have to rely on US technology,
but to have everything available locally, because
this gives Europe more independence.
And about attacking: honestly, this is thank God the last thing Europeans have in mind. Our American friends are more under attack from the inside: their economy is stumbling, and there is an unprecedented loss of those values that were considered US-American (civil liberties, for instance).
Thankfully Europe is a project about peace
and long-term economic strength, not about
waging more unnecessary wars.
By the way, if you're interested in how GPS
is to be seen as a mosaic piece
of a larger process of human learning, and how
better navigation improves scientific progress
and understanding, I recommend the book The Mapmakers (2nd ed).
--
Coolbeans! The patent-pending Nuggets, SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.
It would seem that a fair size comparison between
two different types of things (like apples and peaches) must involve a more abstract metric to
do both justice.
In the case of laptop v tablet PC I suggest size
comparisons to be based on the surface
are of the opened/unfolded laptop, which is after
all its working size (the surface it occupies when it's actually used).
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Let's say you break a file into blocks, encrypt those blocks with Rijndael or Serpent using a chaining method that authenticates the prior block, digitally sign the result using (seperately generated) RSA, DSA and ECC signatures in turn, and generate SHA-1 and Whirlpool checksums of both the encrypted and unencrypted file.
True, you'd spend longer validating and decrypting the unholy mess generated than you'd spend downloading it, but I think you'd be fairly safe in assuming that the file was what it claimed to be.
Maybe, maybe not. The new technique would
certainly be more difficult to analyse mathematically, but just stacking complicated
but flawed methods does not necessarily result
in a more secure method: typically, the security
of the weakest link determines the security of
the whole system.
What you say reminds me of Don Knuth's experience
when he wrote his first innocent 'super' pseudo random number generator (reported in his Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, page 4: "Algorithm K";-): he composed all sorts of complicated operations, but had to learn the resulting number sequence was far from more (pseudo-)random, in fact much worse than the the standard 1-line modulo function.
Another case of (false sense of) security through obscurity?
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in London, there's a shop called 'All things left-handed'; they have special scissors for left-handed people and other hillarious items
there's a great book about laterality called 'Left Hand, Right Hand' by Chris McManus (nomen est omen -- the Latin for 'hand' is manus;-). Here's the Website of the book: click me
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If you have experience, as evidenced by successfully completed industrial projects, employers will value this far more than a degree from a respectable school. However, in the absence of proven project experience, you will be judged by whatever evidence you can produce, and that is ultimately going to be your degree. My advice would be: if you want to be
on the safe side, change to a reasonably
well-respected CS school _and_ get more project
experience by doing internships at large corporations' labs in your summer breaks.
Another recommendation (less related to your question, but very important nevertheless) that makes success in
the industry more likely is to consider
spending one term/semester abroad (it proves your flexibility and widens your perception and personal network).
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Have you tried getting management to buy the software required for a project?
Same holds for hardware. I have known employees
who bought their own harddrives and installed
them (illegally), just because it was the only
way to get their work done....
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The point is that it's a problem solving experience - and not just in technology. It doesn't require expertise in Microsoft Word. It doesn't take a techie to know this stuff. You can measure a person's aptitude for logic, problem-solving, etc. without ever testing specific examples of those skills.
I would be very surprised if those people
could come up with a test that didn't rely
on Microsoft technology entirely. When I read
they want to test people's problem's solving
abilities, I heard an alarm bell ring in my
head and a little evil voice said "Excel!"
Just a prophecy, let's see...
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...for a BSD-licensed 2.0 Linux kernel is not evil at all. The guy is free to offer whatever he wants, but of course his bid might be too low. Note, though, that since his request for a BSD-licensed instance of the code doesn't necessarily have to be exclusive. Making available an old version of Linux BSD-style could raise a lot of money from e.g. embedded development companies, so the question whether $50K is appropriate depends on whether
(a) there is some consensus among the developers about the price, which in turn depends who many such private licenses are likely to be granted (which in turn depends on whether Mr Murkey plans about sharing his acquisition with others), and
(b) whether he can practically manage to locate and convince all developers. Not all developers might be known, but that's not HIS fault. If people contribute to the kernel without leaving a comment of what they did and who they are, I'm not sure what copyright law says about claims those people can make. Think about somebody who came out in 2004 claiming to have authored your favorite folklore song; I don't think any court would assign rights a posteriori, with the song being printed in thousands of song books marked "traditional".
Even the unknown authorship in Linux sources could be solved by asking all known authors to delineate sections of code in Linux they have developed. Regions that have no known owner would have to be re-implemented. (Does such an ownership map exist? How many LOC are owned by 'Anonymous'?)
Would such a procedure harm the open source/free software world? I doubt it. The main development will be on the GPLed branch. And it is not a particular snapshot of the source code that constitute the value of Linux, it's the process of continuous incremental innovation, refinement, and debugging watched my more competent and sceptical eyes than any company could hire for quality control. Without such a powerful task force behind it, a BSD-licensed branch would of verly limited value, because quickly out of date. PANTA RHEI!
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So was the first ever bit to travel over the Net a 0 or a 1??
Assuming that the Honeywell-based IMP was a using
a 7-bit ASCII-like encoding without checksum bit and transferred bit sequentially from most to least significant bit, then the first sequence was 1001100. But I guess it was perhaps rather based on a five-bit teletype scheme.
There wasn't much info on the DDP-516's homepage about that. But I like this quote:
"The Honeywell DDP-516 was chosen for its high clock speed (aprox. 1.1 MHz) and expandability"
The file format should be XHTML. Using XHTML rather than HTML allows using XML tools and easier "data mining". Using HTML/XHTML as the native file format means that you can view a snapshot of the actual source in any browser without a server, and edit it with any HTML editor.... When I save the HTML, the resulting HTML should be copied back to the server, which should validate it, convert the HTML to XHTML if needed, and then check the result into a version control system.
What about XML with dedicated DTDs for calendar,
meeting minutes, support messages, FAQs, software documentation, etc.? You could use XSLT to create XHTML from those automatically, even on the fly.
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Hi. I'm a criminal. I have copied/forged your ID card. Now I am you and what's more I can prove it.
Sorry, but this is a non-argument, for the following reason: _every_ authentification scheme can be circumvented, given enough criminal energy/resources, but that doesn't make all authentification useless: the fact that I could torture you to obtain your UNIX root password (God forbid) doesn't imply we should get rid of passwords in general, because having passwords, and authentification in general, raises the bar.
It's the usual technology arms race.
Insisting ID cards don't make sense because they can be forged amounts to rejecting banknotes because you can fake them. You simply have to make the system as hard to break as possible, and try to catch those who still succeed (that's why there are anti-fraud police units).
...they contain the same information as your passport, except for the vista stamps, just in a compact form that makes it easier to always carry it in your wallet. No need to remeber it anymore when you drive to the airport.
And if you're having a small car accident somewhere and both parties don't want to bother calling the police you can quickly exchage your (authenticated!) name.
In effect, the ID card is a downsized version of the ID card that is already part of EU passports (the plastic, machine-readable part). And there's no secret information stored on it either, because you can tell how the information is encoded in the two machine-readable lines of text:
The lead string "ID" to calibrate the card readers.
Surname
First mame
Number of the ID card
Country issued
Date issued
Expiration date
Checksum
Say Cowboy Neal was born in Britain on 1 January 1977 and had an ID card that expired on the UNIX epoch (just making this up), then his entry could read (assuming the British card follows the European model):
(X, Y, Z being check digits I can't be bothered to compute right this morning, and the spurious blank is inserted by./ somehow...)
So it's very simple and transparent, no Orwellian tech built in. That's why I love my (German) ID card and always carry it (even in Britain) to give evident that I'm me (and not Elvis), fly around without having to remember did I forget my passport, and yet nobody can easily abuse the system. A biometric passport, on the other hand, would be a completely different matter...
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Now the question is why? It might be bad marketing, we know many great products fail for some reason or another.
I wasn't aware of 3com's Audrey, however I have to say its design sucks (somewhat like the crossing of an electric false teeth cleaner and a DSL router). Perhaps they should have hired a designer of the iMac league to make it a successful gadget.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people even say 'a visa' instead of the correct singular 'a visum' (visa is also plural). However, most people don't realize this to be incorrect.
So they are constantly charging you for things you don't use? I think such a mode of billing not only rips you off, it encourages wastefulness in off-peak times (because everything is 'free' unless you stay below-peak).
Just throw a pile of integrated circuits on the living room floor with a manual and leave them alone with it for a while. Usualy, they will come to your home office after 15 minutes asking you "Mummy, what's a tri-state?"
That's almost a flamebait in the original post, because it's so utterly unprincipled, ineffective and inefficient.
Ideally, there'd be a search engine which is part of the operating system, and Microsoft has recognised this and has been working on it for quite some time now. It will be a major selling point of Longhorn, and I predict it will dramatically enhance Windows usability compared to Linux.
Unfortunately, the open source community has not recognised the problem as a whole, but I'm aware the people on the ReiserFS file system have ambitious future plans to include features in that direction (but that might come too late), and I wouldn't count on the likes of Yahoo/Google to deliver the ultimate UNIX/Linux search solution.
--
Try Nuggets , the first SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.
People fight over water, food and natural resources.
When our resources get scarce, we go to war over them.
In managing our resources, and in sustainable development,
we plant the seeds of peace.
-- Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Price)
This previous post deserves to be modded up for containing this sentence.
Yes, please consider this advice, fellow geeks: how many monitors are always on even when they're not used for hours? And who pays attention to buying energy-efficient servers? Green PCs with power-saving modes? Recently left on the light when you weren't in the room for hours? Do you drive a car that needs more gas than the state of the art per 100 km? You don't even know how much your car needs?
If only more people had constant awareness of such issues, and taught their children to treat energy as something precious that must never be wasted, then this might have a higher impact than technical advancement in engergy effectiveness.
--
Coolbeans! The patent-pending Nuggets , SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.
It's nice to see that cross-national EU procedures seem to be in place to monitor these kinds of worrying development. It shows that the EU is not (just) about bureaucracy and 'being ruled from Brussels' as my British friends like to put it, but actually an effective means to watch what all its member governments are doing.
--
Coolbeans! The Nuggets , SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web, now all across the UK.
Exactly. The US have piled up tons of VX nerve gas, and chemical/atomic weapons (yes, WMD by any definition) and THAT is wasting taxpayers' money, IMHO, not launching another GPS service. Some things have to be done multiple times to learn and incrementally improve the technology. It's good not to have to rely on US technology, but to have everything available locally, because this gives Europe more independence.
And about attacking: honestly, this is thank God the last thing Europeans have in mind. Our American friends are more under attack from the inside: their economy is stumbling, and there is an unprecedented loss of those values that were considered US-American (civil liberties, for instance).
Thankfully Europe is a project about peace and long-term economic strength, not about waging more unnecessary wars. By the way, if you're interested in how GPS is to be seen as a mosaic piece of a larger process of human learning, and how better navigation improves scientific progress and understanding, I recommend the book The Mapmakers (2nd ed).
--
Coolbeans! The patent-pending Nuggets , SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.
In the case of laptop v tablet PC I suggest size comparisons to be based on the surface are of the opened/unfolded laptop, which is after all its working size (the surface it occupies when it's actually used).
--
Coolbeans! The patent-pending Nuggets , SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.
Now we all need to download new drivers from www.thinkpad.cn...
Maybe, maybe not. The new technique would certainly be more difficult to analyse mathematically, but just stacking complicated but flawed methods does not necessarily result in a more secure method: typically, the security of the weakest link determines the security of the whole system.
What you say reminds me of Don Knuth's experience when he wrote his first innocent 'super' pseudo random number generator (reported in his Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, page 4: "Algorithm K" ;-): he composed all sorts of complicated operations, but had to learn the resulting number sequence was far from more (pseudo-)random, in fact much worse than the the standard 1-line modulo function.
Another case of (false sense of) security through obscurity?
--
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GNU.org: ... can simply decide they are exempt from the restrictions.
governments
I wonder if this holds e.g. for the US military: can they (legally) take your source code if you prohibit military use? I doubt it.
GNU should append a clause to their licenses that military use is prohibited so that nobody can get harmed by Free code.
Another recommendation (less related to your question, but very important nevertheless) that makes success in the industry more likely is to consider spending one term/semester abroad (it proves your flexibility and widens your perception and personal network).
--
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Same holds for hardware. I have known employees who bought their own harddrives and installed them (illegally), just because it was the only way to get their work done....
--
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I would be very surprised if those people could come up with a test that didn't rely on Microsoft technology entirely. When I read they want to test people's problem's solving abilities, I heard an alarm bell ring in my head and a little evil voice said "Excel!"
Just a prophecy, let's see...
--
Try Nuggets , our natural language SMS search engine. It answers your questions via SMS, across the UK.
-
(a) there is some consensus among the developers about the price, which in turn depends who many such private licenses are likely to be granted (which in turn depends on whether Mr Murkey plans about sharing his acquisition with others), and
- (b) whether he can practically manage to locate and convince all developers. Not all developers might be known, but that's not HIS fault. If people contribute to the kernel without leaving a comment of what they did and who they are, I'm not sure what copyright law says about claims those people can make. Think about somebody who came out in 2004 claiming to have authored your favorite folklore song; I don't think any court would assign rights a posteriori, with the song being printed in thousands of song books marked "traditional".
Would such a procedure harm the open source/free software world? I doubt it. The main development will be on the GPLed branch. And it is not a particular snapshot of the source code that constitute the value of Linux, it's the process of continuous incremental innovation, refinement, and debugging watched my more competent and sceptical eyes than any company could hire for quality control. Without such a powerful task force behind it, a BSD-licensed branch would of verly limited value, because quickly out of date. PANTA RHEI!Even the unknown authorship in Linux sources could be solved by asking all known authors to delineate sections of code in Linux they have developed. Regions that have no known owner would have to be re-implemented. (Does such an ownership map exist? How many LOC are owned by 'Anonymous'?)
--
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Assuming that the Honeywell-based IMP was a using a 7-bit ASCII-like encoding without checksum bit and transferred bit sequentially from most to least significant bit, then the first sequence was 1001100. But I guess it was perhaps rather based on a five-bit teletype scheme.
There wasn't much info on the DDP-516's homepage about that. But I like this quote: "The Honeywell DDP-516 was chosen for its high clock speed (aprox. 1.1 MHz) and expandability"
Birth of the Internet
Honeywell Series 16
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What about XML with dedicated DTDs for calendar, meeting minutes, support messages, FAQs, software documentation, etc.? You could use XSLT to create XHTML from those automatically, even on the fly.
--
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Sorry, but this is a non-argument, for the following reason: _every_ authentification scheme can be circumvented, given enough criminal energy/resources, but that doesn't make all authentification useless: the fact that I could torture you to obtain your UNIX root password (God forbid) doesn't imply we should get rid of passwords in general, because having passwords, and authentification in general, raises the bar. It's the usual technology arms race.
Insisting ID cards don't make sense because they can be forged amounts to rejecting banknotes because you can fake them. You simply have to make the system as hard to break as possible, and try to catch those who still succeed (that's why there are anti-fraud police units).
Of course I meant 'end of' UNIX epoch and ./, not /. ;)
And if you're having a small car accident somewhere and both parties don't want to bother calling the police you can quickly exchage your (authenticated!) name.
In effect, the ID card is a downsized version of the ID card that is already part of EU passports (the plastic, machine-readable part). And there's no secret information stored on it either, because you can tell how the information is encoded in the two machine-readable lines of text:
- The lead string "ID" to calibrate the card readers.
- Surname
- First mame
- Number of the ID card
- Country issued
- Date issued
- Expiration date
- Checksum
Say Cowboy Neal was born in Britain on 1 January 1977 and had an ID card that expired on the UNIX epoch (just making this up), then his entry could read (assuming the British card follows the European model):(X, Y, Z being check digits I can't be bothered to compute right this morning, and the spurious blank is inserted bySo it's very simple and transparent, no Orwellian tech built in. That's why I love my (German) ID card and always carry it (even in Britain) to give evident that I'm me (and not Elvis), fly around without having to remember did I forget my passport, and yet nobody can easily abuse the system.
A biometric passport, on the other hand, would be a completely different matter...
--
Try Nuggets , the first UK SMS search engine. Answer your questions via simple text messages, all across the UK.
I wasn't aware of 3com's Audrey, however I have to say its design sucks (somewhat like the crossing of an electric false teeth cleaner and a DSL router). Perhaps they should have hired a designer of the iMac league to make it a successful gadget.
BTW, were you happy with the machine yourself?