I am not convinced that a lot of mediocre programmers acting with software engineering tools and methods are any better than one gifted programmer acting alone. In fact, in my experience, the reverse is true. One person can bring a visionary piece of code forward, which can be refined over time. A group can spread the risk and potentially produce a less-buggy first cut, but cannot truly innovate, because any group automatically dumbs down. Unless everyone in the group is fantastic - a long shot bet if I've ever seen one - the result will be mediocre code.
1. review all of your existing code and list the things that each script does
2. decide how to consolidate and divide out these tasks, and make sure that any functions or data that needs to be shared, or may in the future need to be shared, is separated out into modules
3. document all of the programs to be written, their interfaces and their effects
Does it seem to anyone else that Win* is really just a lot of bugs into which some features have inadvertantly crept, despite the best efforts of Microsoft's staff?
I can make people that are scarier than anything you can put in latex.
Scarier than Janet Reno in Latex?
Is there a way to mod me down for breaking the mental image rule?
Re:How do you tell what is and isn't spam?
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My definition, adopted from long enough ago that I can't remember who said it, is:
1. any email sent to more than 5 people who don't know the sender and didn't request the email
2. any posting on more than 5 newsgroups
Content is irrelevant.
I suppose I would say that spam is getting to be an undefined term these days. It is raking in "classic spam" and also unsolicited advertising via email or posts on non-sales-related newsgroups or weblogs. Soon it will probably include any email from anyone you don't know, or who doesn't name you in the to: or cc: lines, or whatever.
Frankly, I think that there is one thing that Apple could add to its developer suite that would dramatically add to the Aqua apps on MacOSX: add in libs for common Linux/*BSD windowing toolkits (such as GTK). Essentially, the idea is to allow GTK (and so on) calls to display Aqua widgets.
It would be less cool than porting all of the open source apps to use Aqua natively, but from the user's point of view, this is not noticable. On the other hand, a large amount of software (including GIMP) would become almost immediately available with a native interface.
1) The Federal government should encourage, not discourage, the use of encryption, without key escrow or back doors, by not regulating encryption in any way. (The government should also invest heavily in the appropriate technology to break encryption when it needs to do so.) Without the fear of government intervention, application designers will be encouraged to add encryption to email and other software as a business advantage to themselves, thus allowing my business to communicate more securely with ease.
2) The Federal government should encourage open source and open standards by requiring the use of open source software and open standards on all government systems (except possibly military/intelligence systems). This will get more eyes on the code, thus reducing vulnerabilities and fixing them faster, and will ensure that people are unable to take advantage of unpublic holes in uncheckable software.
3) The Federal government should generally *not* regulate the internet, as this can introduce holes that cannot be fixed because of regulatory requirements. In particular, the government should not use either legislation or funding to control the use of the internet by libraries, schools and other non-Federal government institutions, or by private individuals and organizations. There are a few exceptions I would be OK with:
a) requiring "edge filtering" so that networks would not support denial of service attacks;
b) allowing wire fraud charges against people/organizations who deliberately send email without proper and valid headers (or with forged headers), so as to obscure their identity while sending unsolicited commercial email and/or perpetuating scams (note that this should be allowed for the purpose of anonymously propagating a political opinion, for example, just not for commercial use);
c) requiring organizations who control internet naming or numbering to have public accountability, as these organizations were largely granted a monopoly by the US government; opening up these processes to a standards-based system where everyone can participate; or allowing anti-trust legislation against such bodies if they attempt to coercively control internet access.
4) The Federal government should designate ISPs and online communities as common carriers.
5) The Federal government should require cable and telephone companies, as part of their FCC licensing requirements, to offer the option of access to the network for paying subscribers wihtout mandatory membership in an ISP, and in particular an ISP should not be allowed to gain monopoly status by association with a government-granted monopoly such as a cable system. This would have reduced the @Home debacle, for example, to a trivial matter. The potential for AOL/Warner is even worse down the road if something is not done to guarantee choice in broadband access.
OK, I guess I got a little away from security with those last some of that.
I'm on Charter in the DFW, TX area, and my connection was up by Sunday afternoon. The problem is, I need the static IP addresses for VPN to work, and cannot get hold of Charter *at all* - waited on hold *2 hours* on Saturday night before I gave up - to ask them about getting a static address set back up.
The fact that the private sector invariably gives rise to the worst possible situation for the consumer, and that space should not be available for the obscene profit gouging that the US supports wholeheartedly. Given the fact that in every market our government has shown its willingness to bend over and take it from its corporate masters, why should space be any different?
This "fact" does not exist. Indeed, even a cursory examination of economic history reveals your statement to be completely false.
I would go on at length, but basically I am convinced you are just trolling for people with enough sense to see you as a fraud, but not enough to keep from responding as if you were worth responding to.
"Turn around, Mr. Jones - RIGHT NOW!!! See that blue door? Go through there. Hey! Did you think I wouldn't notice you walking past the door without going in? GO IN, I SAID!!! Now, now, Mr. Jones, stay away from the garbage bin. Stay away fro... [muffled]"
Our media didn't mention it before? Clearly, you have not been paying attention. May I suggest NPR, which has had several stories on the missionaries, who worked for a German group, being held in Afghanistan.
To build a space colony, you need a lot of mass just for radiation shielding. Moon dirt works well for that, and is a lot cheaper to loft than material from Earth.
You state early on that mining Mars or asteroids is unlikely to be profitable, and then state that the moon is better because space colonies need radiation shielding, which can be gotten relatively cheaply by using lunar regolith. Nowhere do you state why people would want to build space colonies, rather than lunar or martian colonies. I'd be curious to know why people would rather build space colonies (which are more difficult to construct and supply) than planetside colonies.
Re:And the key to cutting the cost would be ..
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 1
ducktape. Yes folks, the only thing that will survive the nuclear war besides coakroaches.
Calling the operating system GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd or whatever is not egotism (or not just egotism, anyway). It's an accurate description of what the system is. Look at, for instance, reviews [unixreview.com] calling openUNIX "Linux without Linux". That just sounds absurd, unless you know that the first "Linux" actually means "GNU".
So we should call openUNIX "GNU/openUNIX"? How about calling MacOS X "GNU/MacOS X" since it uses gcc and a slew of other gnu tools?
Yeah, that was a Solaris (and VAX?) worm. It hit our engineering network gateway box (the only Solaris system we had) and we were offline for about 3 hours (in the middle of the night) while we cleaned it out. Interestingly enough, at the time enough admins knew each other that most of the information on fixing the problem was spread by phone calls. (Some was also by email and USENET, but those were effectively disrupted for many people.)
It's a race between the controlling agents (including MPAA, RIAA and others) and the trading agents (content producers and consumers). If the controlling agents win, then the existing physical model of distribution will be replicated in virtual space, complete with restrictions on how trading agents can use what they pay for on the one hand, and profit from producing content on the other hand. In other words, the interests of the superstars and distribution companies will be protected while the vast majority of both content producers and consumers will continue to have no say in what is produced or consumed.
On the other hand, should a model be found where content producers could present their content without a distributor, and make money at it, and where consumers could get that content without restrictions and for a fair price, then the distributors will largely disappear from the virtual world, and eventually from the physical world to some extent. (If I can sell my farm produce without paying a distributor, my family farm can be more profitable. If I can buy produce from a farmer directly, my food will be fresher and safer and cheaper.)
The problem is that the distributors have figured this out and most of the content producers and consumers have not.
What I would like to see is a way to interlink computers with 3D worlds in a similar way to the web. Any person who wants could run a server, with whatever restrictions they want (such as limiting who could build (possibly just to themselves) and how much) and whatever content they want. The equivalent of a link would be a door or similar portal. You could wander the web visually, picking up whatever objects (games, files, docs, etc) that suited you, examining them in place (no download that way) and the like. As long as the graphics primitives were stored on the client, then all you would have to download in the arrangement of the primitives and the locations of various people and objects. Your system would then render the images, and you could interact appropriately.
Of course, it would really suck if your connection dropped, and your avatar were doomed to wander the web with 404 (the number of the iBeast?) tattood to its forehead.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not convinced that a lot of mediocre programmers acting with software engineering tools and methods are any better than one gifted programmer acting alone. In fact, in my experience, the reverse is true. One person can bring a visionary piece of code forward, which can be refined over time. A group can spread the risk and potentially produce a less-buggy first cut, but cannot truly innovate, because any group automatically dumbs down. Unless everyone in the group is fantastic - a long shot bet if I've ever seen one - the result will be mediocre code.
-jeff
If it's that important to you that "your code IS your comments", just write in COBOL. COBOL is documentation that runs.
1. review all of your existing code and list the things that each script does
2. decide how to consolidate and divide out these tasks, and make sure that any functions or data that needs to be shared, or may in the future need to be shared, is separated out into modules
3. document all of the programs to be written, their interfaces and their effects
4. then, and only then, begin coding
-jeff
Does it seem to anyone else that Win* is really just a lot of bugs into which some features have inadvertantly crept, despite the best efforts of Microsoft's staff?
-jeff
war orbiting
Scarier than Janet Reno in Latex?
Is there a way to mod me down for breaking the mental image rule?
My definition, adopted from long enough ago that I can't remember who said it, is:
1. any email sent to more than 5 people who don't know the sender and didn't request the email
2. any posting on more than 5 newsgroups
Content is irrelevant.
I suppose I would say that spam is getting to be an undefined term these days. It is raking in "classic spam" and also unsolicited advertising via email or posts on non-sales-related newsgroups or weblogs. Soon it will probably include any email from anyone you don't know, or who doesn't name you in the to: or cc: lines, or whatever.
Frankly, I think that there is one thing that Apple could add to its developer suite that would dramatically add to the Aqua apps on MacOSX: add in libs for common Linux/*BSD windowing toolkits (such as GTK). Essentially, the idea is to allow GTK (and so on) calls to display Aqua widgets.
It would be less cool than porting all of the open source apps to use Aqua natively, but from the user's point of view, this is not noticable. On the other hand, a large amount of software (including GIMP) would become almost immediately available with a native interface.
In no particular order:
1) The Federal government should encourage, not discourage, the use of encryption, without key escrow or back doors, by not regulating encryption in any way. (The government should also invest heavily in the appropriate technology to break encryption when it needs to do so.) Without the fear of government intervention, application designers will be encouraged to add encryption to email and other software as a business advantage to themselves, thus allowing my business to communicate more securely with ease.
2) The Federal government should encourage open source and open standards by requiring the use of open source software and open standards on all government systems (except possibly military/intelligence systems). This will get more eyes on the code, thus reducing vulnerabilities and fixing them faster, and will ensure that people are unable to take advantage of unpublic holes in uncheckable software.
3) The Federal government should generally *not* regulate the internet, as this can introduce holes that cannot be fixed because of regulatory requirements. In particular, the government should not use either legislation or funding to control the use of the internet by libraries, schools and other non-Federal government institutions, or by private individuals and organizations. There are a few exceptions I would be OK with:
a) requiring "edge filtering" so that networks would not support denial of service attacks;
b) allowing wire fraud charges against people/organizations who deliberately send email without proper and valid headers (or with forged headers), so as to obscure their identity while sending unsolicited commercial email and/or perpetuating scams (note that this should be allowed for the purpose of anonymously propagating a political opinion, for example, just not for commercial use);
c) requiring organizations who control internet naming or numbering to have public accountability, as these organizations were largely granted a monopoly by the US government; opening up these processes to a standards-based system where everyone can participate; or allowing anti-trust legislation against such bodies if they attempt to coercively control internet access.
4) The Federal government should designate ISPs and online communities as common carriers.
5) The Federal government should require cable and telephone companies, as part of their FCC licensing requirements, to offer the option of access to the network for paying subscribers wihtout mandatory membership in an ISP, and in particular an ISP should not be allowed to gain monopoly status by association with a government-granted monopoly such as a cable system. This would have reduced the @Home debacle, for example, to a trivial matter. The potential for AOL/Warner is even worse down the road if something is not done to guarantee choice in broadband access.
OK, I guess I got a little away from security with those last some of that.
-jeff
I'm on Charter in the DFW, TX area, and my connection was up by Sunday afternoon. The problem is, I need the static IP addresses for VPN to work, and cannot get hold of Charter *at all* - waited on hold *2 hours* on Saturday night before I gave up - to ask them about getting a static address set back up.
-jeff
This "fact" does not exist. Indeed, even a cursory examination of economic history reveals your statement to be completely false.
I would go on at length, but basically I am convinced you are just trolling for people with enough sense to see you as a fraud, but not enough to keep from responding as if you were worth responding to.
Combine GPS with machine speach:
"Turn around, Mr. Jones - RIGHT NOW!!! See that blue door? Go through there. Hey! Did you think I wouldn't notice you walking past the door without going in? GO IN, I SAID!!! Now, now, Mr. Jones, stay away from the garbage bin. Stay away fro... [muffled]"
-jeff
It was a slow news year.
Our media didn't mention it before? Clearly, you have not been paying attention. May I suggest NPR, which has had several stories on the missionaries, who worked for a German group, being held in Afghanistan.
They can interfere with the radio-based navigational equipment. Unfortunately, not well enough in this instance.
Love is the Law, Love under Will.
I don't like Crowley very much, though, since he tends to miss a lot. There is both Love and Truth, and Truth supercedes Love.
The better formulation is that of Gardner:
Do what thou wilt, an harm none.
-jeff
You state early on that mining Mars or asteroids is unlikely to be profitable, and then state that the moon is better because space colonies need radiation shielding, which can be gotten relatively cheaply by using lunar regolith. Nowhere do you state why people would want to build space colonies, rather than lunar or martian colonies. I'd be curious to know why people would rather build space colonies (which are more difficult to construct and supply) than planetside colonies.
Keith Richards will also survive nuclear war.
- create/delete/resize volume groups, volumes, filesystems on the fly
- mirror/stripe and undo it on the fly
- no fsck on reboot - normally even if you just power off
- ability to use SSA disks
- device support in general is great
- runs on RS/6000s, which are some of the best enterprise hardware you can get
- database-controlled configuration of hardware
- fast, fast, fast, fast
- good documentation, good online support, reasonable phone support (though pricey)
SMIT is only useful if you forget a command name. Most AIX admins use the command line for just about everything.So we should call openUNIX "GNU/openUNIX"? How about calling MacOS X "GNU/MacOS X" since it uses gcc and a slew of other gnu tools?
Ooops - I meant SunOS. Solaris was somewhat later. Sorry about that.
Yeah, that was a Solaris (and VAX?) worm. It hit our engineering network gateway box (the only Solaris system we had) and we were offline for about 3 hours (in the middle of the night) while we cleaned it out. Interestingly enough, at the time enough admins knew each other that most of the information on fixing the problem was spread by phone calls. (Some was also by email and USENET, but those were effectively disrupted for many people.)
-jeff
It's a race between the controlling agents (including MPAA, RIAA and others) and the trading agents (content producers and consumers). If the controlling agents win, then the existing physical model of distribution will be replicated in virtual space, complete with restrictions on how trading agents can use what they pay for on the one hand, and profit from producing content on the other hand. In other words, the interests of the superstars and distribution companies will be protected while the vast majority of both content producers and consumers will continue to have no say in what is produced or consumed.
On the other hand, should a model be found where content producers could present their content without a distributor, and make money at it, and where consumers could get that content without restrictions and for a fair price, then the distributors will largely disappear from the virtual world, and eventually from the physical world to some extent. (If I can sell my farm produce without paying a distributor, my family farm can be more profitable. If I can buy produce from a farmer directly, my food will be fresher and safer and cheaper.)
The problem is that the distributors have figured this out and most of the content producers and consumers have not.
What I would like to see is a way to interlink computers with 3D worlds in a similar way to the web. Any person who wants could run a server, with whatever restrictions they want (such as limiting who could build (possibly just to themselves) and how much) and whatever content they want. The equivalent of a link would be a door or similar portal. You could wander the web visually, picking up whatever objects (games, files, docs, etc) that suited you, examining them in place (no download that way) and the like. As long as the graphics primitives were stored on the client, then all you would have to download in the arrangement of the primitives and the locations of various people and objects. Your system would then render the images, and you could interact appropriately.
Of course, it would really suck if your connection dropped, and your avatar were doomed to wander the web with 404 (the number of the iBeast?) tattood to its forehead.
-jeff