Keeping it simple refers to not using uber-elite syntactical structures and vocabulary with far to many unnecessary modifiers to elucidate a point when it is just as easy to say it cleanly and simply.
"You began your statement with a parenthetical. You use nothing but sentence fragments. Your essay has no thesis statement and no topic sentences, althogh the latter doesn't matter because there are no paragraphs. You capitalized a word in the middle of a sentence. You quoted someone else but did not use quotation marks."
I won't nitpick on the althogh. In fact I won't respond to your nitpicks at all, but I do think they're a funny attempt;)
It took me longer to nitpick your post than it took for you to contradict the post you replied to. Astoundingly, you proved that poster's point.
CONTENT matters. STYLE matters less. To " completely and unambigously" in the passage you quote, I would add "effortlessly." I should not have to exert myself to understand what you're saying. A difficult concept may require effort, but parsing your words shouldn't. If it does, then you are an idiot. If you make what I perceive to be stupid mistakes, then you appear to be an idiot. There is an unsubtle distinction between the two.
It seems to me you are arguing for me. Bogus spelling and grammar take more effort to parse. As another poster pointed out significantly: especially in public forums, it is rude not to pay attention to detail, which includes spelling and grammar (and, to an extent, style, IMHO), because you're writing something once that will be read many times. Any smear in the article is a smear to N people; to readers thinking that you realize your posting is being read by N people, it's an N-fold smear because apparently you don't even respect each reader enough to give them a 1/Nth correct post. I hope it makes a little sense. And that I spelled 'apparently' correctly.
I believe the quoted OP intended the "it" in "does it matter" to refer to "someone's work if devoid of common rules of grammar and usage", not to "you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing", although both are possible legitimate parsings.
Yes, that's how I parsed it eventually actually. That's why I said Yes, meaning, Yes, it matters if someone's work is devoid of common rules of grammar and usage (presuming this means some of those rules are broken by broken spelling or grammar).
Maybe I misparsed it, but as I said, a peculiar way to phrase things;)
Keeping it simple is using one way to spell things (the correct way), not allowing all kinds of fuzz because people can't be arsed to spell things correctly. It helps parsing. It shows respect to the reader. Amongst other things.
If someone's written work is devoid of some common rules of grammar and usage, does it matter if you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing?
I have registered as being against software patents, and have sent an email with the FT article link to some friends. This has resulted in 2 companies registering against and donating some sponsorship money today alone.
remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.
you're probably right about the nsa being years ahead of the rest of the world, however the above isn't a good example of that because that little episode (des becoming public) pretty much started public cryptographic research.
The point is, unless the casino is using a lava lamp to generate their random numbers, there is a mathematical algorithm behind the random numbers used for the cards, and algorithms can be subject to prediction, although it may not actually be easily done with modern hardware.
There are algorithms to generate random numbers that specifically protect against this sort of thing, cryptographically. See Yarrow for instance. No chance whatsoever inferring its state only from observing a few numbers.
They could give the money back, but it would probably take days to locate individual donors. Because no one would get reimbursed for the time it takes to locate donors (if they can be found at all), the volunteers would essentially be working against the original intent for which the money was given.
Perhaps the money could be used to set up a trust for a scholarship fund. If the trust was set up properly, with the appropriate oversight, it could be a perpetual source of fund for students entering the computer science field.
Now who wants more computer scientists?
Anyone?
This posting appears in the linuxfund story, and in the north korean hackers rival cia story.. i wonder wtf is going on.
I think the reason for this is that any new invention/discovery now takes years of reading and understanding the basic work that has already been done.
Parent:
Nah, it's that this is the amount of time it takes to fill out all the intellectual property paperwork before you announce...;-)
Ha, wish I hadn't wasted all my mod points on one of these previous dumb stories. That's Funny.
Any word on the MTBF of these things? And would they ever need to be defragmented?
Don't know about MTBF, but as they're not mechanical I'm sure they can live much longer than spinning disks (except for the write issue, but that can be buffered with more spares). As for defragging - don't think so, as defragging is only useful to reduce seek times while accessing the same file (the same file isn't physically scattered on disk). As there are no seek times here, why bother defragging.. file systems could be a bit simpler too.
I wonder how many customers would go to a bank that charged double everyone' else service charges in return for being more secure.
I said certain things. Not everything has to be done twice, for many operations (that don't require high access on the employees part) it's possible to secure them technically. Heavens, why am I even explaining this.
Setting aside security-Utopia for a second, at some point you have to trust your own employees, especially "upper level" ones. When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there's not a lot one can do to prevent malfeasance.
Well, there's the many-eyes (or something) approach. Certain things can only be done by more than one employee at the same time, so they have to be in collusion to pull of something fishy.
I agree with / believe all of your post except for this bit:
The Internet, as it exists today, is largely a spanning tree - there is b*** all anyone can do if a link goes down or some idiot cuts a cable when digging.
Having actually worked at an ISP, even a pretty small one, I can assure you it isn't (a tree) in the least. Links go down all the time.
Bring more stylized movement into the game, more theatrics and less of the old "run and hop" movement.
I think it would become boring quickly, if it's just eye candy and doesn't add to the gameplay. Counter-strike isn't much to look at but has good gameplay, and that is the reason it's still popular.
Passwords just don't work anymore. As computers have gotten faster, password guessing has gotten easier. Ever-more-complicated passwords are required to evade password-guessing software. At the same time, there's an upper limit to how complex a password users can be expected to remember. About five years ago, these two lines crossed: It is no longer reasonable to expect users to have passwords that can't be guessed. For anything that requires reasonable security, the era of passwords is over.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't agree more.
I won't nitpick on the althogh. In fact I won't respond to your nitpicks at all, but I do think they're a funny attempt ;)
It took me longer to nitpick your post than it took for you to contradict the post you replied to. Astoundingly, you proved that poster's point.
CONTENT matters. STYLE matters less. To " completely and unambigously" in the passage you quote, I would add "effortlessly." I should not have to exert myself to understand what you're saying. A difficult concept may require effort, but parsing your words shouldn't. If it does, then you are an idiot. If you make what I perceive to be stupid mistakes, then you appear to be an idiot. There is an unsubtle distinction between the two.
It seems to me you are arguing for me. Bogus spelling and grammar take more effort to parse. As another poster pointed out significantly: especially in public forums, it is rude not to pay attention to detail, which includes spelling and grammar (and, to an extent, style, IMHO), because you're writing something once that will be read many times. Any smear in the article is a smear to N people; to readers thinking that you realize your posting is being read by N people, it's an N-fold smear because apparently you don't even respect each reader enough to give them a 1/Nth correct post. I hope it makes a little sense. And that I spelled 'apparently' correctly.
Yes, that's how I parsed it eventually actually. That's why I said Yes, meaning, Yes, it matters if someone's work is devoid of common rules of grammar and usage (presuming this means some of those rules are broken by broken spelling or grammar).
Maybe I misparsed it, but as I said, a peculiar way to phrase things ;)
Oops, yes you're right. I suppose I got a little excited. Thanks for the tip ;)
Keeping it simple is using one way to spell things (the correct way), not allowing all kinds of fuzz because people can't be arsed to spell things correctly. It helps parsing. It shows respect to the reader. Amongst other things.
What is slashdot but a bunch of intellectuals (or intellectual wannabes) showing off to each other?
As for sounding like an intellectual - spelling errors can make you look like a retard. What do you prefer?
(What a funny way to phrase that.) Answer: Yes.
Or customer support.
Sure, it says something about the authors philosophical point of view on quality, but, really. Customer support?
A book that has inspired me to change my attitude towards service for the better is The Practice of System and Network Administration. It's very good for other reasons too.
If we all do this, things will go well.
On that page ("The Transformed Man, William Shatner"), below: "3 people recommended Has Been instead of The Transformed Man" :)
you're probably right about the nsa being years ahead of the rest of the world, however the above isn't a good example of that because that little episode (des becoming public) pretty much started public cryptographic research.
There are algorithms to generate random numbers that specifically protect against this sort of thing, cryptographically. See Yarrow for instance. No chance whatsoever inferring its state only from observing a few numbers.
why 'almost'?
also, it's a unix glob pattern as well, not just dos wildcard..
A friend of mine implemented tetris using a laser to trap 1 mirometre glass beads. Short story + picture + video here. More explanation here.
Ha, wish I hadn't wasted all my mod points on one of these previous dumb stories. That's Funny.
Don't know about MTBF, but as they're not mechanical I'm sure they can live much longer than spinning disks (except for the write issue, but that can be buffered with more spares). As for defragging - don't think so, as defragging is only useful to reduce seek times while accessing the same file (the same file isn't physically scattered on disk). As there are no seek times here, why bother defragging.. file systems could be a bit simpler too.
I said certain things. Not everything has to be done twice, for many operations (that don't require high access on the employees part) it's possible to secure them technically. Heavens, why am I even explaining this.
Well, there's the many-eyes (or something) approach. Certain things can only be done by more than one employee at the same time, so they have to be in collusion to pull of something fishy.
How about it driving everyone bonkers?
I think it would become boring quickly, if it's just eye candy and doesn't add to the gameplay. Counter-strike isn't much to look at but has good gameplay, and that is the reason it's still popular.