Once I lost some mail. Stuff didn't get fowarded when I moved. I called the Post Office and they said they would "investigate." I didn't have high hopes.
But I was pleasantly surprised two days later when the missing mail was delivered along with a a letter from the post master explaining what happened, where my mail had been, and the steps they'd taken to avoid this problem in the future. I also received a follow-up phone call to make sure everything was answered to my satisfaction. I was blown away.
It was a lot better than the reply I got when I complained to UPS that the deliver guy would fling my mail-order photographic equipment on my second story balcony in the rain (on multiple occasions!).
Explaining to the IRS every couple of years that you didn't report such-and-such income because it was earned by somebody else illegally using your SSN.
Explaining to the police that the abandoned car that was believed to have been used for running drugs between Mexico and California and was purchased on your credit and licensed in your name was really bought by criminals.
Explaining all of the above to your new employer who now does background checks based on your SSN.
Not just email spam either. I get telemarketing calls from companies that want to host my domain or design my site. I also get lots of snail-mail junk mail, not only for my site, but for the domain the previous owner of my house registered.
Let's also remember that more than half of California residential telephone customers pay every month to prevent publication of their info in the phone book.
I'd kill to get one of those VAXstation mice. They were soooo comfortable and responsive. We were all disappointed when they cheaped out and replaced the balls with the two wheels at 90 degrees. We used to hoard the old ones whenever we upgraded our VAXen.
It would definitely take some getting used to. Despite the fact that I'm part of the MTV generation, I can't keep up with the editing in the action scenes of many movies today. The cuts are just too quick for my old brain. Perhaps we'll have to learn how to watch these new films, or only the younger generation will develop an appreciation for these kinds of distortions.
What pulled me into the article was the second image with the boy and girl waiting on opposite sides of the street. The convinced me that this will become a new tool of composition for directors, whether they're making an action pick or a good simple story.
Oh, and I immediately thought of 24. I think this technique would be terrific in some of those split-screen shots. The split-screen is nothing new. In fact, it's kind of retro.
Before I was able to afford a film scanner, I used a light-table and an NTSC-camcorder fed into a digitizing board to scan some slides. Pop the camcorder into macro mode, and press it right down on the slide. I got much better images than I expected. Saturation and illumination were great. Resolution left something to be desired.
Also, bytes became commonly known as 8-bit values later, when IBM determined that was the sanest value for them. Before that, they were simply a common usage unit, much as 'int' has become today.
As I learned it, a byte is the smallest directly addressable unit of memory. There were indeed machines with 6-bit bytes and 9-bit bytes, etc. I think old versions of TeX can actually be compiled and run on any machine with at least 6-bit bytes.
A word was the most natural size for the processor, typically the size of the accumulator or general purpose registers. Lots of classic texts refer to machines with "36-bit words" and the like. Those terms all got corrupted.
It's interesting to note that many RFCs and specs use "octet" to refer to an eight-bit quantity on the off-chance that your bytes are different.
The Three Investigators website lists Robert Arthur's credits, which include the first 11 Three Investigators books. I seem to recall there being more to the series, so perhaps later ones were written by other authors.
This is a standard multi-image trick. It works with front or rear projection. To get the images truly seamless, you overlap the projection areas (anywhere from 10 to 50%) and use a grayscale gradient mask to blend the overlapping areas. This technique was perfected with those zillion-projector slide shows from the '80s.
The trick lives on today with video projections. Dataton has a product (Watchout) which does it in real time with a network of computers. And, as another poster pointed out, aligning the projectors is less of an issue, since you can now use a cam and some extra cycles to warp the projected images rather than adjusting the projectors.
I'm forbidden to use Visual Studio tools to make any word processing or spreadsheet application, unless it's a small part of a larger application.
I found this difficult to believe (and annoying, since I am making a new word processor), so I started searching the web. I found one similar statement that said I can't use the Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine redistributable to make a work processor or spreadsheet. I didn't find anything about Visual Studio (or any of the "Visual" languages) Is this the restriction you're referring to?
In a really old April Fool's edition of Byte (or was it Kilobaud, there was a description of the trinary computer. Each trit could be true, false, or who cares?.
It would be great if we could chuck the whole user-based system in favor of some sort of role or program-based model where programs have privileges based on what they are rather than who is running them. But since both Unix and Windows are heavily based on the user-centric model, that's going to be very difficult.
Ah, you want VMS.
VMS had (has?) a user-centric model, but it also had an application-centric one. If you were the admin for a system, and you had a trusted app that required certain privileges, you could grant the privileges to the application rather than the users. For example, you could give your backup application READALL privilege so it could copy every file to tape regardless of the file protection, but that didn't confer READALL to the user in general. Thus your operators couldn't go snooping through user's files. The tapes were generally in a locked room that only the operators had access to, but if you had a public drive, then you could use an access control list or a group protection to limit access to the empowered copy of the backup application.
It wasn't a perfect system. If you found a flaw in a trusted app that let you crash out while it was actually using that privilege, then you're process would now have that privilege. But that was rare, the damage was relatively contained, and the holes were easy to patch.
Privileges were much finer grained than all-or-nothing Unix-style root/non-root. Privileges could be turned off and on as needed (if you had SETPRIV).
Back in the day, I recall that whenever the VMS-Unix debates hit the security topic, the Unix folks would just throw up their hands and claim Unix wasn't really designed for security.
Oh my, how a decade changes things. Now Unix is the secure OS and Windows NT--arguably a descendent of VMS--is like swiss cheese.
Re:Hydrogen - The future of Buzzword Energy
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The end user thinks their helping the environment, but what really happens is that the production of a carbon exhaust is moved back in the supply chain.
I agree, but isn't it easier and more cost-efficient to put pollution controls onto a relatively small number of plants than it is to put them on hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, homes, etc.? And isn't it more economical to keep those controls up-to-date with the latest advancements?
In a radio interview, a representative from the Air Quality Management Board in Southern California said the challenge is that most of the pollution now comes from sources beyond their control (industry, interstate trucking, lawnmowers). Modern cars pollute tiny amounts compared to lawnmowers and these new gas-powered scooters. Sure, there are millions of cars, so they add up, but it's hard to squeeze out any more efficiency at the leaf nodes.
Most of the lamps I've bought in the last two years have dimmer circuits built in, so they are incompatible with compact fluorescents. Even the tiny ones, which are hard to find, don't fit many common lamps.
Some brands quickly develop problems which cause delays of several seconds to switch on. Not very convenient.
I have had to replace nine compact fluorescents in the three years I've been using them. (Seven fixtures, I've had to replace a couple of them twice.) Where is the alleged seven-year bulb? At $10+ a pop, this is not saving me money on electricity.
There are environmental concerns with the disposal of fluorescent bulbs which contain mercury. Notices from my city indicate that fluorescent bulbs cannot be thrown in the trash but must be dropped off at the hazardous waste site (by appointment). I suppose this wouldn't be as big of a problem if they really lasted seven years.
And they're problematic with energy-saving measures like home automation and motion detectors.
In an effort to be "friendly," newer versions of MS Windows default to hiding those oh-so-confusing file extensions from helpless uses, so they'll typically see "foo" rather than "foo.pif". Even nastier are those infection files named things like "photo.jpg.pif". Windows dutifully hides the.pif extension, and the user sees "photo.jpg". Doesn't look so dangerous that way.
Microsoft and some analysts will tell you about all the support calls and service problems. That's hysterical.
My biggest reservation about open and free software is that it's not obvious how I would make a living if the whole world switched. Programming is my most marketable skill* and has kept me employed for many years. I know Stallman says that we could make money supporting free software and filling in the holes, but I've always been skeptical of the demand. Ernie Ball seems to support my concern.
* My other career option is writing. That doesn't pay the bills, and, if we totally kill rather than fix copyright laws, it'll never pay.
I don't think she's referring to campaign contributions. I think she's referring to the fact that Issa personally put up a large chunk of the $3+ million raised to collect the signatures necessary for the recall.
My friend go so tired of people on his team sending him word docs, that he learned TeX and started sending his replies that way. When he feels really nasty about it, he sends the.dvi files.
I'll probably be modded off-topic, since a story like this on Slashdot is nothing more than MS-bashing flamebait, but I'll try anyone.
First of all, the article says "crashes in Windows," not "crashes of Windows." So it's not entirely clear to me if they are counting application crashes which don't impact the whole system or just the ones that bring down the OS (as most of the bashers in this thread seem to think).
Second, if this is based on error reports, it's skewed by a lot of things. For example, I send the reports when I suspect it's MS code at fault, and I don't send them when I suspect a third party app. I figure MS can't do anything about the third parties, so why bother. The point is, lots of things can skew these numbers.
But most importantly, the bulk of the article, which most Slashdotters seem to be ignoring, is about tracking root causes of bugs. There is no silver bullet in software quality, but this approach is a good place to start. It's something that should be taught in CS courses, and it's something we experienced programmers should be training our juniors to pay attention to.
When you fix a bug, do you ask yourself how it got in there? Where else in your code a similar bug may appear? How can you avoid making the same mistake in the future. How you could have detected the bug sooner? How did the test cases miss it? These are powerful questions if you take them seriously.
It's a mindset all programmers should have. Ironically, I learned it from a Microsoft book, Writing Solid Code by Steven Maguire. Buy it, read it. Pass a copy onto your peers.
I would agree with you except for two points. (1) What's the definition of a crash? (2) Applications are not the only third party software on the machine.
If a third-party app hangs, GPFs, or otherwise exits abruptly, we call that a crash. But that doesn't mean the OS has locked up or that other applications have been affected. The article doesn't make it clear whether they are counting application crashes or whether they mean OS crashes.
Device drivers run in privileged modes where the OS cannot offer all the same protections that it can offer an application. A bad driver from a hardware manufacturer can ruin your whole day.
Tip: Don't carry your Social Security number in your wallet. If your wallet is lost or stolen, the thief would have everything needed for any credit application, since your name, address, and birthday are on your driver's license.
Note that most health insurance companies put your SSN on your health insurance cards. If you're paranoid that you'll end up in the emergency room and they won't treat you because they can't find your insurance card, then make up a card with the carrier's name, the policy number, and a list of phone numbers of emergency contacts.
I won't bore you with the saga of my friend who had her identity stolen. It would sound like an urban legend. The theft not only resulted in horrible damage to her credit report (that lasted for seven years), but trouble with the law (because the theives bought a car that was used for drug running under her name) and hassles from the IRS (because her SSN was sold to others who were employed with her name and SSN, making it look like my friend had not reported income). All of this happened because of a purse-snatching.
There's one more ingredient to your recipe: get lucky.
It doesn't help when the spammers use a dictionary attack against your domain (aaron@domain.com, abigail@domain.com, adam@domain.com,...). I guess your domain has never caught the attention of such spammers. Lucky you. They troll my domain on a regular basis.
Some of the published experiments that try to track the harvesters have found that short names near the beginning of the alphabet (like mine) are far more likely to get tons of spam. Other problems are needing to support addresses like "webmaster".
The spider web effect is different. The rat effect doesn't always work, so perhaps you haven't seen it. Others in the thread have also pointed out the rat effect.
Given the age of the Haunted Mansion, I don't think Disney has many patents left on the original effects. However, they have patented updates to old effects. The Madame Leota crystal ball illusion has been upgraded to an internal video projection transmitted by fiber optics. Apparently, however, they have had problems keeping it working and have occasionally switched back to the external periscope projector. They have patented an improvement to the busts that follow your movements, making the illusion effective over a wider viewing angle. I don't think they've modified the ones at Disneyland, but perhaps the HMs at other Disney parks are sporting the upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
Once I lost some mail. Stuff didn't get fowarded when I moved. I called the Post Office and they said they would "investigate." I didn't have high hopes.
But I was pleasantly surprised two days later when the missing mail was delivered along with a a letter from the post master explaining what happened, where my mail had been, and the steps they'd taken to avoid this problem in the future. I also received a follow-up phone call to make sure everything was answered to my satisfaction. I was blown away.
It was a lot better than the reply I got when I complained to UPS that the deliver guy would fling my mail-order photographic equipment on my second story balcony in the rain (on multiple occasions!).
There's more pain:
The post offices near my last two homes have multi-year waiting lists for PO Boxes.
Not just email spam either. I get telemarketing calls from companies that want to host my domain or design my site. I also get lots of snail-mail junk mail, not only for my site, but for the domain the previous owner of my house registered.
Let's also remember that more than half of California residential telephone customers pay every month to prevent publication of their info in the phone book.
I'd kill to get one of those VAXstation mice. They were soooo comfortable and responsive. We were all disappointed when they cheaped out and replaced the balls with the two wheels at 90 degrees. We used to hoard the old ones whenever we upgraded our VAXen.
It would definitely take some getting used to. Despite the fact that I'm part of the MTV generation, I can't keep up with the editing in the action scenes of many movies today. The cuts are just too quick for my old brain. Perhaps we'll have to learn how to watch these new films, or only the younger generation will develop an appreciation for these kinds of distortions.
What pulled me into the article was the second image with the boy and girl waiting on opposite sides of the street. The convinced me that this will become a new tool of composition for directors, whether they're making an action pick or a good simple story.
Oh, and I immediately thought of 24. I think this technique would be terrific in some of those split-screen shots. The split-screen is nothing new. In fact, it's kind of retro.
Before I was able to afford a film scanner, I used a light-table and an NTSC-camcorder fed into a digitizing board to scan some slides. Pop the camcorder into macro mode, and press it right down on the slide. I got much better images than I expected. Saturation and illumination were great. Resolution left something to be desired.
As I learned it, a byte is the smallest directly addressable unit of memory. There were indeed machines with 6-bit bytes and 9-bit bytes, etc. I think old versions of TeX can actually be compiled and run on any machine with at least 6-bit bytes.
A word was the most natural size for the processor, typically the size of the accumulator or general purpose registers. Lots of classic texts refer to machines with "36-bit words" and the like. Those terms all got corrupted.
It's interesting to note that many RFCs and specs use "octet" to refer to an eight-bit quantity on the off-chance that your bytes are different.
The Three Investigators website lists Robert Arthur's credits, which include the first 11 Three Investigators books. I seem to recall there being more to the series, so perhaps later ones were written by other authors.
This is a standard multi-image trick. It works with front or rear projection. To get the images truly seamless, you overlap the projection areas (anywhere from 10 to 50%) and use a grayscale gradient mask to blend the overlapping areas. This technique was perfected with those zillion-projector slide shows from the '80s.
The trick lives on today with video projections. Dataton has a product (Watchout) which does it in real time with a network of computers. And, as another poster pointed out, aligning the projectors is less of an issue, since you can now use a cam and some extra cycles to warp the projected images rather than adjusting the projectors.
I found this difficult to believe (and annoying, since I am making a new word processor), so I started searching the web. I found one similar statement that said I can't use the Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine redistributable to make a work processor or spreadsheet. I didn't find anything about Visual Studio (or any of the "Visual" languages) Is this the restriction you're referring to?
In a really old April Fool's edition of Byte (or was it Kilobaud, there was a description of the trinary computer. Each trit could be true, false, or who cares?.
Ah, geek humor.
Ah, you want VMS.
VMS had (has?) a user-centric model, but it also had an application-centric one. If you were the admin for a system, and you had a trusted app that required certain privileges, you could grant the privileges to the application rather than the users. For example, you could give your backup application READALL privilege so it could copy every file to tape regardless of the file protection, but that didn't confer READALL to the user in general. Thus your operators couldn't go snooping through user's files. The tapes were generally in a locked room that only the operators had access to, but if you had a public drive, then you could use an access control list or a group protection to limit access to the empowered copy of the backup application.
It wasn't a perfect system. If you found a flaw in a trusted app that let you crash out while it was actually using that privilege, then you're process would now have that privilege. But that was rare, the damage was relatively contained, and the holes were easy to patch.
Privileges were much finer grained than all-or-nothing Unix-style root/non-root. Privileges could be turned off and on as needed (if you had SETPRIV).
Back in the day, I recall that whenever the VMS-Unix debates hit the security topic, the Unix folks would just throw up their hands and claim Unix wasn't really designed for security.
Oh my, how a decade changes things. Now Unix is the secure OS and Windows NT--arguably a descendent of VMS--is like swiss cheese.
I agree, but isn't it easier and more cost-efficient to put pollution controls onto a relatively small number of plants than it is to put them on hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, homes, etc.? And isn't it more economical to keep those controls up-to-date with the latest advancements?
In a radio interview, a representative from the Air Quality Management Board in Southern California said the challenge is that most of the pollution now comes from sources beyond their control (industry, interstate trucking, lawnmowers). Modern cars pollute tiny amounts compared to lawnmowers and these new gas-powered scooters. Sure, there are millions of cars, so they add up, but it's hard to squeeze out any more efficiency at the leaf nodes.
Most of the lamps I've bought in the last two years have dimmer circuits built in, so they are incompatible with compact fluorescents. Even the tiny ones, which are hard to find, don't fit many common lamps.
Some brands quickly develop problems which cause delays of several seconds to switch on. Not very convenient.
I have had to replace nine compact fluorescents in the three years I've been using them. (Seven fixtures, I've had to replace a couple of them twice.) Where is the alleged seven-year bulb? At $10+ a pop, this is not saving me money on electricity.
There are environmental concerns with the disposal of fluorescent bulbs which contain mercury. Notices from my city indicate that fluorescent bulbs cannot be thrown in the trash but must be dropped off at the hazardous waste site (by appointment). I suppose this wouldn't be as big of a problem if they really lasted seven years.
And they're problematic with energy-saving measures like home automation and motion detectors.
Sorry, I tried.
In an effort to be "friendly," newer versions of MS Windows default to hiding those oh-so-confusing file extensions from helpless uses, so they'll typically see "foo" rather than "foo.pif". Even nastier are those infection files named things like "photo.jpg.pif". Windows dutifully hides the .pif extension, and the user sees "photo.jpg". Doesn't look so dangerous that way.
My biggest reservation about open and free software is that it's not obvious how I would make a living if the whole world switched. Programming is my most marketable skill* and has kept me employed for many years. I know Stallman says that we could make money supporting free software and filling in the holes, but I've always been skeptical of the demand. Ernie Ball seems to support my concern.
* My other career option is writing. That doesn't pay the bills, and, if we totally kill rather than fix copyright laws, it'll never pay.
I don't think she's referring to campaign contributions. I think she's referring to the fact that Issa personally put up a large chunk of the $3+ million raised to collect the signatures necessary for the recall.
My friend go so tired of people on his team sending him word docs, that he learned TeX and started sending his replies that way. When he feels really nasty about it, he sends the .dvi files.
I'll probably be modded off-topic, since a story like this on Slashdot is nothing more than MS-bashing flamebait, but I'll try anyone.
First of all, the article says "crashes in Windows," not "crashes of Windows." So it's not entirely clear to me if they are counting application crashes which don't impact the whole system or just the ones that bring down the OS (as most of the bashers in this thread seem to think).
Second, if this is based on error reports, it's skewed by a lot of things. For example, I send the reports when I suspect it's MS code at fault, and I don't send them when I suspect a third party app. I figure MS can't do anything about the third parties, so why bother. The point is, lots of things can skew these numbers.
But most importantly, the bulk of the article, which most Slashdotters seem to be ignoring, is about tracking root causes of bugs. There is no silver bullet in software quality, but this approach is a good place to start. It's something that should be taught in CS courses, and it's something we experienced programmers should be training our juniors to pay attention to.
When you fix a bug, do you ask yourself how it got in there? Where else in your code a similar bug may appear? How can you avoid making the same mistake in the future. How you could have detected the bug sooner? How did the test cases miss it? These are powerful questions if you take them seriously.
It's a mindset all programmers should have. Ironically, I learned it from a Microsoft book, Writing Solid Code by Steven Maguire. Buy it, read it. Pass a copy onto your peers.
I would agree with you except for two points. (1) What's the definition of a crash? (2) Applications are not the only third party software on the machine.
If a third-party app hangs, GPFs, or otherwise exits abruptly, we call that a crash. But that doesn't mean the OS has locked up or that other applications have been affected. The article doesn't make it clear whether they are counting application crashes or whether they mean OS crashes.
Device drivers run in privileged modes where the OS cannot offer all the same protections that it can offer an application. A bad driver from a hardware manufacturer can ruin your whole day.
Tip: Don't carry your Social Security number in your wallet. If your wallet is lost or stolen, the thief would have everything needed for any credit application, since your name, address, and birthday are on your driver's license.
Note that most health insurance companies put your SSN on your health insurance cards. If you're paranoid that you'll end up in the emergency room and they won't treat you because they can't find your insurance card, then make up a card with the carrier's name, the policy number, and a list of phone numbers of emergency contacts.
I won't bore you with the saga of my friend who had her identity stolen. It would sound like an urban legend. The theft not only resulted in horrible damage to her credit report (that lasted for seven years), but trouble with the law (because the theives bought a car that was used for drug running under her name) and hassles from the IRS (because her SSN was sold to others who were employed with her name and SSN, making it look like my friend had not reported income). All of this happened because of a purse-snatching.
There's one more ingredient to your recipe: get lucky.
It doesn't help when the spammers use a dictionary attack against your domain (aaron@domain.com, abigail@domain.com, adam@domain.com, ...). I guess your domain has never caught the attention of such spammers. Lucky you. They troll my domain on a regular basis.
Some of the published experiments that try to track the harvesters have found that short names near the beginning of the alphabet (like mine) are far more likely to get tons of spam. Other problems are needing to support addresses like "webmaster".
The spider web effect is different. The rat effect doesn't always work, so perhaps you haven't seen it. Others in the thread have also pointed out the rat effect.
Given the age of the Haunted Mansion, I don't think Disney has many patents left on the original effects. However, they have patented updates to old effects. The Madame Leota crystal ball illusion has been upgraded to an internal video projection transmitted by fiber optics. Apparently, however, they have had problems keeping it working and have occasionally switched back to the external periscope projector. They have patented an improvement to the busts that follow your movements, making the illusion effective over a wider viewing angle. I don't think they've modified the ones at Disneyland, but perhaps the HMs at other Disney parks are sporting the upgrade.