Windows supposedly has the greatest security model in the world, but I don't understand it, I've never understood it, and I've never met anyone who could explain it to me. Occasionally there's ordinary files that aren't open but that I can't modify AND I HAVE NO CLUE WHY THIS HAPPENS. Some hidden attribute, God knows what it is. Etcetera.
Vista proves what I've always suspected: even Microsoft can't set up a secure, usable Windows system without pissing me off on a continual basis with warnings and promptings and bullshit. So excuse me, I'll stick with XP, run as admin, live behind my locked-down firewall, run Firefox and NoScript, and avoid widgets and downloads and attachments and so forth like I've been doing since Windows 95.
And I'll continue to wait for Apple to wake the hell up and release OS[whatever roman numeral it is now] generically, so maybe this long nightmare can finally end.
Turns out a lot happened before you were born, my friend. For example, Corbato's Compatible Time Sharing System, built at MIT in 1961, solved the problem of "spinning processes" locking up the machine, which Microsoft Windows still hasn't solved to this day, judging by Vista's behavior on my new laptop. That problem was also solved by OS/MFT, also designed and built in the 1960's (see "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks). It was also solved by every major commercial operating system ever released. It is an obvious problem, with a very easy solution (drop the dispatch priority of the offending process below non-offending processes, but give it a bit of CPU from time to time, or all of the CPU if nobody else needs any. Duh.)
This is exactly right. The code can be mediocre, it's the design that counts. Code can always be refactored if it's stupid or slow, but if the design is bad, you can be the Michelangelo of the coding world and your product will still suck.
Corollary: always document the design, not the code. As a software manager, nothing pisses me off more than tediously commented code with no overall design or statement of "here's what I'm trying to do." I don't really care how smart you are, or how clever your algorithm is. Most of the time, in fact, I'd rather that you just did something plain vanilla, because the 80-20 rule says that 80% of your code can be mediocre and stupid and nobody will care.
Actually, the Compatible Time Sharing System (Corbato, et al, 1962 or so) is a better candidate for the father of all modern operating systems. CTSS, for example, continued to provide reasonable response to the other users even when a process went spinning in a tight loop. This is something that Windows still hasn't solved.
Good luck backing the thing OUT of the garage. Near as I can tell from the animation video, the rear and rear-quarter visibility, when the wings are folded, is zero.
Yes, the police system creates fear. But does fear deter crime? The answer is no. This has been proven by countless studies over the years, many of which have focused on capital punishment and its deterrent effect (it has none - see, for example, this).
So your most of your argument is specious.
The part of your argument that is incontestable is the part where you say "[prison] takes [criminals] off the streets." That, in fact, does lower the crime rate, although there are much more sensible approaches to lowering the crime rate (for example, de-criminalizing drug use (see this)).
The fact that Indiana didn't catch the woman for 35 years implies to me that they probably didn't try very hard -- hell, she didn't even move out of state. I'll bet there's a subtext to the story, or circumstances that we don't know about, that convinced the cops that she posed zero threat to society and wasn't worth expending the resources to track down. That judgment, if it was made, turned out to be true.
There was also a recent theory that it was plain old malaria that did them in, attacking from Africa through Sicily and finally arriving with a vengeance on the coastal plains and marshes. The death rate was horrific, and general panic ensued, since the disease vector was mysterious. Barbarian raiders supposedly reported "no resistance" when landing at previously well-defended port cities.
You seem to know what you're talking about -- any merit to the above?
Compare the number of plane trips per year and number of plane deaths with the number of car trips per year and the number of car deaths.
Hold on there a second, Statistics Boy.
First, let's consider my actual risk factors. What if I'm not under 25 (the age group that dies like flies in auto accidents)? Guess what, I'm an old fart, so I'm way (WAY) safer without lifting a finger. What if I travel mostly on interstate highways (much safer than secondary roads, by a huge margin)? Once again, I win without effort. What happens if I don't drive at night (much more hazardous than daytime driving, (a) because nobody can see, and (b) because every 10th driver is drunk)? Another win. What happens if I drive a big-ass car rather than a tiny-ass POS, so if I hit your tiny-ass POS I live and you die? What if I avoid driving in ridiculous weather? What if I maintain my vehicle well, I have antilock brakes/stability control, I have new tires, and I'm driving a relatively new vehicle instead of some junker? And so on. By the time I eliminate all the risk factors that the airlines INCLUDE in their road statistics, their numbers are meaningless. Let's turn the tables, shall we? OK, airlines, if you're going to include teenage hotrod and dead-drunk idiots in your road statistics, I'm gonna include all the private airplanes that are busy dropping out of the sky on a daily basis. Who wins now?
Second, the "safety" of airlines is always touted by considering total miles traveled, not TIME IN THE VEHICLE -- and of course they're counting all miles traveled, on all kinds of roadways, in all kinds of weather, in all kinds of vehicles. Hour for hour, trip for trip, you're WAY SAFER in a car than in an airplane.
And finally, the statistics are presented courtesy of the airline industry, which is highly motivated to make you think that it's perfectly safe to whizz around in some poorly-maintained piece of shit airframe that's been in service for 15 years and only indifferently maintained. Pardon me if I think they're shaving the numbers. They'd be idiots not to.
Having watched one of my kids jack himself 200 points up from his original score (with a specialized tutor), I'd have to disagree.
Back in the day, some of the high schools around Boston used to send kids home with SAT's for homework every night. You can get good at those tests. You really can.
When I went to MIT back before most of you were zygotes, the admissions formula had already become a carefully-tuned equation (what else would you expect?). For example, high schools in the US were given a quality score, and your SAT score was normalized by your high school's score. So, if you got a 1300 from some one-room schoolhouse in West Virginia, that was considered as good as a 1600 from Weston High School (which routinely turned out 1600's, and was widely recognized as an SAT prep school back when SAT prep was still a relatively new concept, and back when the Educational Testing Service was still claiming (idiotically) that SAT prep wouldn't help).
I have no idea what the MIT formula is today. But I'd expect it to be significantly better than it was. For example, foreign students' ability to score well on Miller Analogies, parts-of-speech memorization, and the meaning of obscure, Bill Buckley-type multisyllabic English words probably has little to do with their ability to become excellent engineers. MIT's rigorous self-examination of the admissions process, and of the success of the students that it does admit, no doubt has tuned the algorithm to reflect that.
One thing that the MIT algorithm didn't (and doesn't) consider: who you are, who your Daddy is, and how much your family has donated. Sorry, you'll need to apply elsewhere, perhaps to that liberal arts school up the river. They'll let you cheat on your Spanish exam, if you're a Kennedy, or get into the business school with a C average, if you're a Bush.
...well, when I discovered that it was like I was banging a smoking hot woman, who to be fair is a little slow, and I found the keys to a Porche at the bottom of her vagina.
I really can't get past that bizarre analogy, dude. Blecch. Also, why did you need the keys to the porch?
Exactly. They are rats with hooves. And they aren't the little mule deer from California, either, these are the big white-tailed deer. Very large animals. I can't mow the lawn without picking ticks off my ass, and I have to surround every shrub and every flower bed with deer netting (and don't tell me that coyote urine or soap or shock sticks or any of the other half-measures work, because they absolutely do not. A hungry deer is not stoppable except by physical barrier, and even then, sometimes not. They will dig under it, reach over it, push against it with their bodies, whatever it takes).
Also, don't tell me about "deer resistant" plantings. There are very few (VERY FEW) plants that deer will not attack. The deer here are so hungry they will eat holly, they will strip pine bark, they will eat rhododendron. They are desperately hungry. Want to grow a vegetable garden to help save the planet? "Thanks, a salad bar!"
Even if you can keep deer off your property, which requires a hideously ugly 10 foot (yes, 10 foot) deer fence and a driveway gate to go with it, the ticks are picked up by chipmunks, squirrels, mice, etc. and spread around regardless. Around here, Lyme disease testing is routine. You feel sick, they test you. Half my neighbors have had it (and it's no joke).
The only solution is to cull the herd to a reasonable level. Deer sightings should be rare, not "Gee, there were six of them chewing the shrubs this morning," or "wow, I passed 13 deer corpses and the 13 totaled vehicles to match on the way to work this morning." If you open the front door and hear them galloping down the driveway as loudly as a John Wayne Western, you know what I'm talking about. One idea is to form a human chain a couple miles long and march right through the woods flushing the bastards into a pre-arranged corral. Then all you bleeding heart animal lovers can pay for the tranquilizer guns and the cattle trucks to move them 600 miles north where they belong; either that, or we shoot them on the spot and give the meat to a homeless shelter.
I'm not a violent person. I don't hunt, and I don't own a gun. But this is ridiculous. They have to be culled.
Right, others simply have to sidestep the brown spew -- or worse, the cast-off brown wad of gum and chewing tobacco favored by major league baseball players. Hey, I know, how about a spitoon on every corner? Lobby your congresscritter!
The problem that many of us have with fundamentalist Christian and other religions is that faith interferes with fact in a way that has already resulted in very bad outcomes for millions of people, and it is quite likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The problem with Christian and other religious academics who pick and choose that which they can intellectually accept or intellectually fit into a semi-rationalist framework, is that they, too, are giving up rationalism for faith. At what point does their faith interfere with their science? Hard to say.
One does not have to reject the concept of an ego to accept that the brain is a complex parallel processing piece of wetware, and, by definition, so are we. However, such a belief would certainly would be a blow to anyone who thinks that there's a "soul" that somehow "persists" after death.
More generally, litigation just isn't the answer. The law is a blunt instrument that, in the end, usually benefits only lawyers.
o This is why we have ridiculous labels on stuff ("don't stick your fingers in the toaster", "don't give this plastic bag to your toddler", "Danger Will Robinson, danger, danger!") that do absolutely nothing to prevent tragedies and simply drive costs up for everyone. o This is why health care is so expensive. I wouldn't be a surgeon no matter how much you paid me. The only people getting rich are the lawyers. o And so on.
I'm not sure I have the answer, in fact I'm sure I don't. But running around suing everyone is just not the answer. If corporate liability was lifted, nobody would start a business. What's the point? You'll just be sued.
God seeded the Earth with very old fossils and so forth to test our faith (nod to Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies"). Obviously this bacterium was on the Ark just like all the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows supposedly has the greatest security model in the world, but I don't understand it, I've never understood it, and I've never met anyone who could explain it to me. Occasionally there's ordinary files that aren't open but that I can't modify AND I HAVE NO CLUE WHY THIS HAPPENS. Some hidden attribute, God knows what it is. Etcetera.
Vista proves what I've always suspected: even Microsoft can't set up a secure, usable Windows system without pissing me off on a continual basis with warnings and promptings and bullshit. So excuse me, I'll stick with XP, run as admin, live behind my locked-down firewall, run Firefox and NoScript, and avoid widgets and downloads and attachments and so forth like I've been doing since Windows 95.
And I'll continue to wait for Apple to wake the hell up and release OS[whatever roman numeral it is now] generically, so maybe this long nightmare can finally end.
Turns out a lot happened before you were born, my friend. For example, Corbato's Compatible Time Sharing System, built at MIT in 1961, solved the problem of "spinning processes" locking up the machine, which Microsoft Windows still hasn't solved to this day, judging by Vista's behavior on my new laptop. That problem was also solved by OS/MFT, also designed and built in the 1960's (see "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks). It was also solved by every major commercial operating system ever released. It is an obvious problem, with a very easy solution (drop the dispatch priority of the offending process below non-offending processes, but give it a bit of CPU from time to time, or all of the CPU if nobody else needs any. Duh.)
This is exactly right. The code can be mediocre, it's the design that counts. Code can always be refactored if it's stupid or slow, but if the design is bad, you can be the Michelangelo of the coding world and your product will still suck.
Corollary: always document the design, not the code. As a software manager, nothing pisses me off more than tediously commented code with no overall design or statement of "here's what I'm trying to do." I don't really care how smart you are, or how clever your algorithm is. Most of the time, in fact, I'd rather that you just did something plain vanilla, because the 80-20 rule says that 80% of your code can be mediocre and stupid and nobody will care.
Darl?
Actually, the Compatible Time Sharing System (Corbato, et al, 1962 or so) is a better candidate for the father of all modern operating systems. CTSS, for example, continued to provide reasonable response to the other users even when a process went spinning in a tight loop. This is something that Windows still hasn't solved.
Good luck backing the thing OUT of the garage. Near as I can tell from the animation video, the rear and rear-quarter visibility, when the wings are folded, is zero.
Yes, the police system creates fear. But does fear deter crime? The answer is no. This has been proven by countless studies over the years, many of which have focused on capital punishment and its deterrent effect (it has none - see, for example, this).
So your most of your argument is specious.
The part of your argument that is incontestable is the part where you say "[prison] takes [criminals] off the streets." That, in fact, does lower the crime rate, although there are much more sensible approaches to lowering the crime rate (for example, de-criminalizing drug use (see this)).
The fact that Indiana didn't catch the woman for 35 years implies to me that they probably didn't try very hard -- hell, she didn't even move out of state. I'll bet there's a subtext to the story, or circumstances that we don't know about, that convinced the cops that she posed zero threat to society and wasn't worth expending the resources to track down. That judgment, if it was made, turned out to be true.
"Ben?"
There was also a recent theory that it was plain old malaria that did them in, attacking from Africa through Sicily and finally arriving with a vengeance on the coastal plains and marshes. The death rate was horrific, and general panic ensued, since the disease vector was mysterious. Barbarian raiders supposedly reported "no resistance" when landing at previously well-defended port cities.
You seem to know what you're talking about -- any merit to the above?
Fine, then we'll put a mask on its face and collect its burps. No, wait, then it can't graze... never mind... FAIL
Hey, how come this isn't modded up? You may or may not agree with the parent poster, but s/he certainly makes some interesting points.
Nice post, Jimithing, even if I don't agree with your EFF rant...
Compare the number of plane trips per year and number of plane deaths with the number of car trips per year and the number of car deaths.
Hold on there a second, Statistics Boy.
First, let's consider my actual risk factors. What if I'm not under 25 (the age group that dies like flies in auto accidents)? Guess what, I'm an old fart, so I'm way (WAY) safer without lifting a finger. What if I travel mostly on interstate highways (much safer than secondary roads, by a huge margin)? Once again, I win without effort. What happens if I don't drive at night (much more hazardous than daytime driving, (a) because nobody can see, and (b) because every 10th driver is drunk)? Another win. What happens if I drive a big-ass car rather than a tiny-ass POS, so if I hit your tiny-ass POS I live and you die? What if I avoid driving in ridiculous weather? What if I maintain my vehicle well, I have antilock brakes/stability control, I have new tires, and I'm driving a relatively new vehicle instead of some junker? And so on. By the time I eliminate all the risk factors that the airlines INCLUDE in their road statistics, their numbers are meaningless. Let's turn the tables, shall we? OK, airlines, if you're going to include teenage hotrod and dead-drunk idiots in your road statistics, I'm gonna include all the private airplanes that are busy dropping out of the sky on a daily basis. Who wins now?
Second, the "safety" of airlines is always touted by considering total miles traveled, not TIME IN THE VEHICLE -- and of course they're counting all miles traveled, on all kinds of roadways, in all kinds of weather, in all kinds of vehicles. Hour for hour, trip for trip, you're WAY SAFER in a car than in an airplane.
And finally, the statistics are presented courtesy of the airline industry, which is highly motivated to make you think that it's perfectly safe to whizz around in some poorly-maintained piece of shit airframe that's been in service for 15 years and only indifferently maintained. Pardon me if I think they're shaving the numbers. They'd be idiots not to.
Yes, you're wrong.
Having watched one of my kids jack himself 200 points up from his original score (with a specialized tutor), I'd have to disagree.
Back in the day, some of the high schools around Boston used to send kids home with SAT's for homework every night. You can get good at those tests. You really can.
Right, nobody should care.
When I went to MIT back before most of you were zygotes, the admissions formula had already become a carefully-tuned equation (what else would you expect?). For example, high schools in the US were given a quality score, and your SAT score was normalized by your high school's score. So, if you got a 1300 from some one-room schoolhouse in West Virginia, that was considered as good as a 1600 from Weston High School (which routinely turned out 1600's, and was widely recognized as an SAT prep school back when SAT prep was still a relatively new concept, and back when the Educational Testing Service was still claiming (idiotically) that SAT prep wouldn't help).
I have no idea what the MIT formula is today. But I'd expect it to be significantly better than it was. For example, foreign students' ability to score well on Miller Analogies, parts-of-speech memorization, and the meaning of obscure, Bill Buckley-type multisyllabic English words probably has little to do with their ability to become excellent engineers. MIT's rigorous self-examination of the admissions process, and of the success of the students that it does admit, no doubt has tuned the algorithm to reflect that.
One thing that the MIT algorithm didn't (and doesn't) consider: who you are, who your Daddy is, and how much your family has donated. Sorry, you'll need to apply elsewhere, perhaps to that liberal arts school up the river. They'll let you cheat on your Spanish exam, if you're a Kennedy, or get into the business school with a C average, if you're a Bush.
...well, when I discovered that it was like I was banging a smoking hot woman, who to be fair is a little slow, and I found the keys to a Porche at the bottom of her vagina.
I really can't get past that bizarre analogy, dude. Blecch. Also, why did you need the keys to the porch?
Exactly. They are rats with hooves. And they aren't the little mule deer from California, either, these are the big white-tailed deer. Very large animals. I can't mow the lawn without picking ticks off my ass, and I have to surround every shrub and every flower bed with deer netting (and don't tell me that coyote urine or soap or shock sticks or any of the other half-measures work, because they absolutely do not. A hungry deer is not stoppable except by physical barrier, and even then, sometimes not. They will dig under it, reach over it, push against it with their bodies, whatever it takes).
Also, don't tell me about "deer resistant" plantings. There are very few (VERY FEW) plants that deer will not attack. The deer here are so hungry they will eat holly, they will strip pine bark, they will eat rhododendron. They are desperately hungry. Want to grow a vegetable garden to help save the planet? "Thanks, a salad bar!"
Even if you can keep deer off your property, which requires a hideously ugly 10 foot (yes, 10 foot) deer fence and a driveway gate to go with it, the ticks are picked up by chipmunks, squirrels, mice, etc. and spread around regardless. Around here, Lyme disease testing is routine. You feel sick, they test you. Half my neighbors have had it (and it's no joke).
The only solution is to cull the herd to a reasonable level. Deer sightings should be rare, not "Gee, there were six of them chewing the shrubs this morning," or "wow, I passed 13 deer corpses and the 13 totaled vehicles to match on the way to work this morning." If you open the front door and hear them galloping down the driveway as loudly as a John Wayne Western, you know what I'm talking about. One idea is to form a human chain a couple miles long and march right through the woods flushing the bastards into a pre-arranged corral. Then all you bleeding heart animal lovers can pay for the tranquilizer guns and the cattle trucks to move them 600 miles north where they belong; either that, or we shoot them on the spot and give the meat to a homeless shelter.
I'm not a violent person. I don't hunt, and I don't own a gun. But this is ridiculous. They have to be culled.
Right, others simply have to sidestep the brown spew -- or worse, the cast-off brown wad of gum and chewing tobacco favored by major league baseball players. Hey, I know, how about a spitoon on every corner? Lobby your congresscritter!
The problem that many of us have with fundamentalist Christian and other religions is that faith interferes with fact in a way that has already resulted in very bad outcomes for millions of people, and it is quite likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The problem with Christian and other religious academics who pick and choose that which they can intellectually accept or intellectually fit into a semi-rationalist framework, is that they, too, are giving up rationalism for faith. At what point does their faith interfere with their science? Hard to say.
One does not have to reject the concept of an ego to accept that the brain is a complex parallel processing piece of wetware, and, by definition, so are we. However, such a belief would certainly would be a blow to anyone who thinks that there's a "soul" that somehow "persists" after death.
Remanco hand-held terminal point-of-sale system, 1987. Type a letter or two, it guessed at the rest (quite cleverly, actually). Prior art galore.
Jesus, I'd just love to see the user interfaces *you* cook up!
More generally, litigation just isn't the answer. The law is a blunt instrument that, in the end, usually benefits only lawyers.
o This is why we have ridiculous labels on stuff ("don't stick your fingers in the toaster", "don't give this plastic bag to your toddler", "Danger Will Robinson, danger, danger!") that do absolutely nothing to prevent tragedies and simply drive costs up for everyone.
o This is why health care is so expensive. I wouldn't be a surgeon no matter how much you paid me. The only people getting rich are the lawyers.
o And so on.
I'm not sure I have the answer, in fact I'm sure I don't. But running around suing everyone is just not the answer. If corporate liability was lifted, nobody would start a business. What's the point? You'll just be sued.
God seeded the Earth with very old fossils and so forth to test our faith (nod to Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies"). Obviously this bacterium was on the Ark just like all the others.
Best idea yet! Thanks for the chuckle.
Right! Or some of these: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/30/list_of_50_be st_movi.html