Bob Parsons sold his previous company, Parsons Technology, purveyors of home accounting, home Bible concordance, home taxes, home legalese software, to Intuit (who sold it to Brøderbund) after Microsoft passed on the deal, so it's not surprising GoDaddy is on the block. He blazed a few new trails through the personal computing woods, I'll give him that, but he was more of a Davey Crockett than a Daniel Boone. Has a penchant for Alamos.
Duh. Google TFA. It's out there. I'm not surprised the proof failed, if it has, since a world that contains NP = P is infinitely more interesting. It would be nice to see a consensus rebuttal by the scholars most closely involved, though.
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Ultra Obviousman. Open source usually means closed, archaic, obsolete or entirely missing FM-for-which-it-is-impossible-to-RT.
Intuition suggests that improvable worlds would be better than universes set in proverbial stone, so P = NP. Even if we can't prove a lemma, that kind of world doesn't rule out accidental proofs by dumb luck or alien intelligence.
Personally, assuming I kinda grok the basics, there are more cases of improvable than provable, such as Sylvain Gelly's MoGo program which can beat average Go players about five decades sooner than expected. P = NP means live is easy, imho.
Privoxy is pretty fair at killing ads (even Slashdot's), and costs zip. You do need to be smart enough to guess how to set it up correctly, but after that, plain sailing.
Google has gotten worse at basic mission (finding stuff) over the years, until the in-your-face privacy invasions have reached a level of such cavalier disdain for private users it's insulting.
What a screwball business model: Deliver value to advertisers by trying to satisfy individuals it could care less about. Just like newspapers!
They should add a Blackberry banned from the United Arab Emirates. Presumably just a fast streaming cipher of some kind? AES is pretty fast, so that just leaves the key generation. More to the point, why would UAE presume the Blackberry was crackable? Because the NSA insists on half-baked security in older phones?
Well, yeah! If you supported Ellsberg, you were a hippie-commie-freak, you wore peace signs on your t-shirt, and you voted for George McGovern even though you knew he'd lose.
If you took the treason side of the argument, you were a Neanderthal-baby-killer-hawk and you voted for Nixon by definition.
It turned out that My Lai was real.
Four photos won that war for Ho Chi Minh. The monk who set himself on fire. The general executing a VC prisoner. The naked girl screaming from napalm burns as she ran down the road. And the horrified coed at Kent State with a dead American college student at her knees.
When America declared war on its own children, the left got righteous and the right was damned. Damn right nobody cheered the troops when they finally came home, even though we had the draft, and knew it wasn't their fault.
The football game in M*A*S*H showed players-soldiers-draftees smoking marijuana. There was a reason for that.
Just looking at stuff on my personal laptop, I've used Ruby, Perl and PHP, but stick with BASH for most quick scripting. If it gets complicated, I turn to C, and if it gets downright annoying, C++. I like Code::Blocks IDE, because it handles most of my needs. It's not Visual Studio by a long country mile, but quick and dirty. If you're coming from Mac's Code Warrior tradition, been there done that, but not a clue what's current or what's next in that country. Apple has a tendency to get religious about C variants nobody uses in the real world, but that might be a reason to look into their stuff.
It looks like the future is tiny apps on tiny platforms, with a distributed scalable model attaching everything together in clouds that don't actually live on particular platforms, but do have to live somewhere. So maybe that's a clue.
Congratulations on finding work as an English major! My hat is off. I had to bootstrap myself through Turbo Pascal, Microsoft C, R:Base 5000 and dBase II, plus required reading in Donald Knuth's heapsort chapters, before I could find work of any kind, back in 1984. Oddly enough, it was a senior level course on Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar that caused the penny to drop, in my case.
Sorry, non-techies don't get it and never will. If you want to spend money on lessons, forget that too. The only way to be a techie is to pass the proficiency test: Do you love this stuff more than life, wife, family and normal hours? Do you do it because the bug has bit you, and you can't help yourself? More specifically, if you're a M$ nerd, have you memorized the keyboard, and your hands know all the shortcuts -- and I do mean ALL the shortcuts -- better than your brain does? Was your first Linux Slackware? If you're on Mac OS X, was the first thing you did was to install X Windows? Is every user manual you ever acquired still lying in the bottom of the box it came in, pristine and untouched? Nobody sane does this stuff. If you're insane, you might be a techie.
Programmers tend to be libertarian dweebs who equate good code with high status in the tiny core of people who program. They can't unionize, they can't conceive of small salaries (i.e., theirs), and they have no concept of exploitation. That happens to R2D2, not programmers.
Yes, software generates millions of dollars and creates vast wealth. Programmers think this is self-evident, like Douglas Adams spelling out how to build civilizations ("Bang the rocks together.") Even my unheard of contributions generated millions of dollars. And yes, my boss took credit for my work.
Burn out, crash and burn, kiddies. It's not covered on your non-existent health insurance, either.
And don't ask or you'll get an electronic fly up your nose. Seriously, how will you incentivize a dead end job for a bunch of trebuchet-hurling libertarians who appreciate ANYBODY'S code as much as or better than their own? The two worlds are immiscible. And I suspect the perceived problem exists only on the side that salutes small bits of brass. Frankly, it's been obvious for at least forty years that Bletchley Park was a British psychological warfare op, and that Turing was sacrificed to reinforce the appearance of competence in an area of contrary-to-fact depressing limits which Turing knew better than anyone.
Perhaps the obvious was not lost on a few nerds, hackers, crackers, black hats and Belgian and Israeli mathematicians who also realized they could spin better "uncrackable codes" in their sleep, and tended to regard ALL governments as the proverbial Ted and Alice. It would be fun just to know (not necessarily to read, but just to know) the white paper on this subject has been written and flushed by interdepartmental rivalries twice already.
Grikdog's Law: Never delegate a job you can't do yourself.
I can image Captain Hook trying to use those magic gestures with a multi-touch screen. Does it pass the Americans with Disabilities Act test? Imagine Tinker Bell using her feet.
Does everyone have thalidomide on the brain? They keep dropping the ball.
Gotta love it. Truecrypt used intelligently is impervious to dictionary attacks. The trick is keyfiles, which can be used together with garden-variety "weak" passwords. It also has hidden volumes, which have a couple of annoying gotchas, which provide "plausible deniability" (it says here). One nice trick with keyfiles is to use steganography to embed a signifant blob of/dev/urandom output into a photograph, which then hides in plain sight along with hundreds or even thousands of other similar photographs (this circumvents keystroke loggers) -- or on a thumb drive or cd-rom. Shred the cd-rom (or smash the thumb drive with a hammer, etc.), and Truecrypt volumes become indecipherable, because the actual key is literally unknown (and unmemorizible by ordinary human brains). Assuming the banker get his drives back (or his backup!), and recovers his copy of the cd-rom bearing the keyfile from his friend in Freeport who thinks it's a bootleg Grateful Dead concert, Truecrypt brings it all back like Lazarus. The Linux version uses an optional cascade of three keys (AES 256, Serpent and Twofish) and the (optional, but recommended) Whirlpool hash algorithm. Steganography is not part of Truecrypt in any version I know.
Have you noticed the http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji16/draw-canvas.html link on Jim Breen's http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi website? Makes it dead easy for Westerners and clumsy beginners to enter three or four strokes of a handwritten character (using the mouse!) and get immediate feedback in the form of 20 candidate characters that might match what you've entered so far. This is the most lenient "clumsy kanji" analysis routine I've seen so far. Bodes very well for cyberlinguistics.
Slashdot Mirror
It's flying up there with the sprites (topside lightning shafts directed up), so maybe it'll get some good meteorology done too?
Gee, I dunno. Why did so many engineers firebomb the living crap out of Dresden and Tokyo? Not to mention...
Crockett, Alamo? You're right. Too subtle for the masses.
Bob Parsons sold his previous company, Parsons Technology, purveyors of home accounting, home Bible concordance, home taxes, home legalese software, to Intuit (who sold it to Brøderbund) after Microsoft passed on the deal, so it's not surprising GoDaddy is on the block. He blazed a few new trails through the personal computing woods, I'll give him that, but he was more of a Davey Crockett than a Daniel Boone. Has a penchant for Alamos.
Duh. Google TFA. It's out there. I'm not surprised the proof failed, if it has, since a world that contains NP = P is infinitely more interesting. It would be nice to see a consensus rebuttal by the scholars most closely involved, though.
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Ultra Obviousman. Open source usually means closed, archaic, obsolete or entirely missing FM-for-which-it-is-impossible-to-RT.
I'm up to here in English. Maybe the Elbonian Embassy needs someone who can translate dilbertasian?
Solar flare, maybe, but seasonal? That sounds like an artifact.
Fine yourself a thousand dollars for every bug you ship, ten thousand for every BSOD a customers sees. Each time.
Hire an old programmer without a job to scream obscenities at you for shipping rip-off jack*** software.
Grow up.
Intuition suggests that improvable worlds would be better than universes set in proverbial stone, so P = NP. Even if we can't prove a lemma, that kind of world doesn't rule out accidental proofs by dumb luck or alien intelligence. Personally, assuming I kinda grok the basics, there are more cases of improvable than provable, such as Sylvain Gelly's MoGo program which can beat average Go players about five decades sooner than expected. P = NP means live is easy, imho.
Privoxy is pretty fair at killing ads (even Slashdot's), and costs zip. You do need to be smart enough to guess how to set it up correctly, but after that, plain sailing.
Google has gotten worse at basic mission (finding stuff) over the years, until the in-your-face privacy invasions have reached a level of such cavalier disdain for private users it's insulting.
What a screwball business model: Deliver value to advertisers by trying to satisfy individuals it could care less about. Just like newspapers!
They should add a Blackberry banned from the United Arab Emirates. Presumably just a fast streaming cipher of some kind? AES is pretty fast, so that just leaves the key generation. More to the point, why would UAE presume the Blackberry was crackable? Because the NSA insists on half-baked security in older phones?
Well, yeah! If you supported Ellsberg, you were a hippie-commie-freak, you wore peace signs on your t-shirt, and you voted for George McGovern even though you knew he'd lose.
If you took the treason side of the argument, you were a Neanderthal-baby-killer-hawk and you voted for Nixon by definition.
It turned out that My Lai was real.
Four photos won that war for Ho Chi Minh. The monk who set himself on fire. The general executing a VC prisoner. The naked girl screaming from napalm burns as she ran down the road. And the horrified coed at Kent State with a dead American college student at her knees.
When America declared war on its own children, the left got righteous and the right was damned. Damn right nobody cheered the troops when they finally came home, even though we had the draft, and knew it wasn't their fault.
The football game in M*A*S*H showed players-soldiers-draftees smoking marijuana. There was a reason for that.
Just looking at stuff on my personal laptop, I've used Ruby, Perl and PHP, but stick with BASH for most quick scripting. If it gets complicated, I turn to C, and if it gets downright annoying, C++. I like Code::Blocks IDE, because it handles most of my needs. It's not Visual Studio by a long country mile, but quick and dirty. If you're coming from Mac's Code Warrior tradition, been there done that, but not a clue what's current or what's next in that country. Apple has a tendency to get religious about C variants nobody uses in the real world, but that might be a reason to look into their stuff. It looks like the future is tiny apps on tiny platforms, with a distributed scalable model attaching everything together in clouds that don't actually live on particular platforms, but do have to live somewhere. So maybe that's a clue.
Congratulations on finding work as an English major! My hat is off. I had to bootstrap myself through Turbo Pascal, Microsoft C, R:Base 5000 and dBase II, plus required reading in Donald Knuth's heapsort chapters, before I could find work of any kind, back in 1984. Oddly enough, it was a senior level course on Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar that caused the penny to drop, in my case.
Sorry, non-techies don't get it and never will. If you want to spend money on lessons, forget that too. The only way to be a techie is to pass the proficiency test: Do you love this stuff more than life, wife, family and normal hours? Do you do it because the bug has bit you, and you can't help yourself? More specifically, if you're a M$ nerd, have you memorized the keyboard, and your hands know all the shortcuts -- and I do mean ALL the shortcuts -- better than your brain does? Was your first Linux Slackware? If you're on Mac OS X, was the first thing you did was to install X Windows? Is every user manual you ever acquired still lying in the bottom of the box it came in, pristine and untouched? Nobody sane does this stuff. If you're insane, you might be a techie.
Programmers tend to be libertarian dweebs who equate good code with high status in the tiny core of people who program. They can't unionize, they can't conceive of small salaries (i.e., theirs), and they have no concept of exploitation. That happens to R2D2, not programmers.
Yes, software generates millions of dollars and creates vast wealth. Programmers think this is self-evident, like Douglas Adams spelling out how to build civilizations ("Bang the rocks together.") Even my unheard of contributions generated millions of dollars. And yes, my boss took credit for my work.
Burn out, crash and burn, kiddies. It's not covered on your non-existent health insurance, either.
And don't ask or you'll get an electronic fly up your nose. Seriously, how will you incentivize a dead end job for a bunch of trebuchet-hurling libertarians who appreciate ANYBODY'S code as much as or better than their own? The two worlds are immiscible. And I suspect the perceived problem exists only on the side that salutes small bits of brass. Frankly, it's been obvious for at least forty years that Bletchley Park was a British psychological warfare op, and that Turing was sacrificed to reinforce the appearance of competence in an area of contrary-to-fact depressing limits which Turing knew better than anyone.
Perhaps the obvious was not lost on a few nerds, hackers, crackers, black hats and Belgian and Israeli mathematicians who also realized they could spin better "uncrackable codes" in their sleep, and tended to regard ALL governments as the proverbial Ted and Alice. It would be fun just to know (not necessarily to read, but just to know) the white paper on this subject has been written and flushed by interdepartmental rivalries twice already.
Grikdog's Law: Never delegate a job you can't do yourself.
Genius.
I can image Captain Hook trying to use those magic gestures with a multi-touch screen. Does it pass the Americans with Disabilities Act test? Imagine Tinker Bell using her feet. Does everyone have thalidomide on the brain? They keep dropping the ball.
Really, back to basics is bottomless if you chose to look beyond convenient hype.
I haven't manage to finish a single ebook in ANY format, talk about coincidence! Half-price Books here in town has a better deal on most titles, too.
Obviously, the obligatory Futurama allusion...
Gotta love it. Truecrypt used intelligently is impervious to dictionary attacks. The trick is keyfiles, which can be used together with garden-variety "weak" passwords. It also has hidden volumes, which have a couple of annoying gotchas, which provide "plausible deniability" (it says here). One nice trick with keyfiles is to use steganography to embed a signifant blob of /dev/urandom output into a photograph, which then hides in plain sight along with hundreds or even thousands of other similar photographs (this circumvents keystroke loggers) -- or on a thumb drive or cd-rom. Shred the cd-rom (or smash the thumb drive with a hammer, etc.), and Truecrypt volumes become indecipherable, because the actual key is literally unknown (and unmemorizible by ordinary human brains). Assuming the banker get his drives back (or his backup!), and recovers his copy of the cd-rom bearing the keyfile from his friend in Freeport who thinks it's a bootleg Grateful Dead concert, Truecrypt brings it all back like Lazarus. The Linux version uses an optional cascade of three keys (AES 256, Serpent and Twofish) and the (optional, but recommended) Whirlpool hash algorithm. Steganography is not part of Truecrypt in any version I know.
Have you noticed the http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji16/draw-canvas.html link on Jim Breen's http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi website? Makes it dead easy for Westerners and clumsy beginners to enter three or four strokes of a handwritten character (using the mouse!) and get immediate feedback in the form of 20 candidate characters that might match what you've entered so far. This is the most lenient "clumsy kanji" analysis routine I've seen so far. Bodes very well for cyberlinguistics.