I'm not familiar with that decision, so I ask this in all sincerity: To what extent does that decision impact the press *versus* individuals? Specifically I'm wondering whether the impact is different on bloggers depending on if you view them as jounalists/members of the press or if you view them as individuals expressing an opinion (my view is slanted towards the latter).
I presume that to "pledge" a patent to the open source community, one could do one of two things: either contribute the patent to the public domain, or license it in some way. I would be surprised if they put it in the public domain, because then competitors could use it for closed source projects.
The question then becomes, what does the license look like that pledges patents to the "open source community" as opposed to the community at large? What kind of restrictions will be placed on the use of the patent under the license?
FUD FUD FUD. I bet you a gazillion dollars that my first amendment right to speak for or against a candidate would not be infringed by FEC regulation of candidates' use of the internet as a communications medium. What it will do is prevent candidates themselves from using blogs in an unregulated fashion. It's like saying that FEC regulation of TV as a campaign communication medium prevents you from ranting on your cable public access channel, which it doesn't.
If I'm wrong, prove it, don't tag it to the end of an article submission.
I'm pretty famliar with C and I have the opposite opinion. Things like if(!ptr) bug the crap out of me because you're implying that a pointer is equivalent to or comparable to an int.
Moreover, it drives me up the wall to see code like ptr = 0; to set a pointer to NULL. C is error prone enough without abusing the overlap between 0, \0, and NULL.
Then again, my job is to fix bugs in production C code, so the only code I ever work with is a) always buggy and b) usually poorly written (well...until I get done with it, that is).
First, when you Ask Slashdot for actual research or empirical evidence to support a widely-accepted hypothesis (such as changing passwords often improves security), you get a bunch of anecdotal drivel. I know this from experience...
That being said, here's at least one academic paper on the subject: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Brostoff /index_fil es/sachas_transfer_report.pdf An interesting quote: "forced password changing causes password problems. The result was highly significant." followed by actual statics demonstrating the significance.
Here's a white paper that seems to argue that complex passwords only provide real protection if you're able to reduce the number of passwords needed (this may just be a marketing pitch for a single-signon product) http://www.protocom.com/whitepapers/Eval AuthSecuri ty.pdf
Most opinions that complex passwords and often changed passwords are more secure are probably based on the presumption that such policies increase the time required to crack a password: http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=ht tp://contra costa.edu/hpc/FaST/2003/Bonnie/passwd_sec.pdf
However, as far as I can tell, no one has really gone out of their way to scientifically compare the effective security provided by various types of password policies in "real world" situations like you describe.
Yeah, you think that, but then again, who would buy a TV that honors the broadcast flag, or a car that has a data recorder over which you have no control, etc. etc. etc.
I don't think this technology will get off the ground, but weirder things have happened. Just need a patent and the right legislation...lobby for a ban on film (you know we have to be worried about the deadly chemicals used in the manufacture and processing of that stuff!), and lobby for a mandate that every device capable of capturing digital photographs implement the technology. That would be a retroactive mandate, of course.
When people don't have a choice, they'll start buying it.
Its competition that makes the company strive for excellence.
No, it's competition that makes the company strive for first-to-market. Excellence is expensive and time consuming. Making an "excellent" product is a last resort for marketers when price, promotion, and hollow features don't win the market share they were looking for. That is, excellence is for people who *know* they won't make it to the market first, no matter what, but still want to compete.
Don't believe that excellence is lower on the list of priorities? If you think about it, the fact that game companies are competing over big-dollar major league exclusivity rights shows how much just slapping "Major League Baseball" or "National Basketball League" or "National Football League" on your game does to improve sales. If someone came up with *the* best baseball video game (whatever you imagine that to be) with fictional teams and players, how do you think its sales would compare to an inferior game with Major League teams and players?
Guess I woke up on the cynical side of the bed this morning...
- C programs with host names hard-coded in #ifdef...#else...#endif blocks that aren't compiled with the right macro defined for the given environment.
- 20-character wide terminal device that vomited all over itself when the program tried to display a 21 character string, which we only tested on 80 character terms before sending to production
- Intermittent communication failures because of a different version of firmware on a network device in production versus dev/QA.
- WAR files that won't deploy in production because prod runs SunONE and dev runs WSAD.
- System commands not behaving the same because dev was Linux and prod was Unix.
- Integration test failures because someone copied the production encryption key to one dev/test server but not the other.
- Programmers forgot to take the hacks out of the makefile so the program will run in their little world before they compiled the test/QA version of the program.
- Version management commands that are different on different OSes.
- Automated test scripts fail because of some minute difference between dev, test, and QA (that one really pisses me off).
You know, I'd like to know the same thing about the CIA's 15 year predictions as Gartner's resear^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrap:
What, if any of their past "predictions" have come true? And is that statistically significantly different from a monkey throwing darts at random predictions...
It was so widely reported that my wife asked me when I got home yesterday whether I'd heard about that "neat Mac-mini thing."
Re:UML Is a throwback to When Cost Was No Issue
on
How Do You Use UML?
·
· Score: 1
go from business user or func-req directly to source code development
You are living in a dream world if you think you can effectively go straight from functional requirements to source code development without a design phase in between. You simply will not end up with quality software. You'll end up with an unmaintainable, non-extensible, almost-gets-the-job-done-but-really-pisses-the-use r-off-at-times piece of crap.
I've been on both kinds of development shops. Give me one that does formal design (UML or otherwise) any day.
The argument that cell phones interfere with instruments seems to be overblown. From a news.com.com.com.com article:
Engineers at NASA noted at least three years ago that cell phones were being built so well that they emitted remarkably fewer interference-causing spurious radio signals. A NASA engineer said in a 2000 interview that the airplane cell phone ban would be lifted once earlier generations of cell phones wore down and were tossed out or recycled.
Of course, that being said, I'd sure like some solid data. Apparently the FAA has commissioned an indepenedent agency to study the effects of cell phones on instrumentation. Results aren't due until 2006.
Anyone heard any further details about the "independent study"?
The problem is that the College no longer represents the population. I would favor the splitting of Electors based on the results of each State's popular vote.
Then lobby your state government to do it that way; each state gets to determine for themselves how they allocate their electors. Colorado actually brought this issue up in a referendum in this very election.
In Cryptonomicon, what was the information contained in the punched sheets of gold foil? I never could find the answer to that question, and I've never run across anyone else who knew either.
In case there are any pimps out there having trouble with the standard English version of the talk, don't wory. It's been translated into Pimp for you!
In (over)simplified terms, Apple just has to make an economic decision between how much a settlement would cost and how much the Apple brand is worth. If A < B, pay the settlement. If A> B, then spinoff and find a different brand to use for the music-related business.
If you believe their latest 10-Q, the Apple brand is worth about $80 million alone. I wouldn't say that "massively dwarfs" the $25+ million settlement in the first go-round with Apple Corps, but it's still a huge hunk of change.
A) Recognize a troll when you see it. B) You went on to prove the point! Law is so complex that none of us can hope to know, let alone comprehend, all of it. Yet we must all be accountable for it.
I don't guess I'm in a "life should be fair" mood today.
Slashdot Mirror
You pop caught you smoking, and he said, "No way!"
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day.
I'm not familiar with that decision, so I ask this in all sincerity: To what extent does that decision impact the press *versus* individuals? Specifically I'm wondering whether the impact is different on bloggers depending on if you view them as jounalists/members of the press or if you view them as individuals expressing an opinion (my view is slanted towards the latter).
I presume that to "pledge" a patent to the open source community, one could do one of two things: either contribute the patent to the public domain, or license it in some way. I would be surprised if they put it in the public domain, because then competitors could use it for closed source projects.
The question then becomes, what does the license look like that pledges patents to the "open source community" as opposed to the community at large? What kind of restrictions will be placed on the use of the patent under the license?
may include regulation of bloggers
FUD FUD FUD. I bet you a gazillion dollars that my first amendment right to speak for or against a candidate would not be infringed by FEC regulation of candidates' use of the internet as a communications medium. What it will do is prevent candidates themselves from using blogs in an unregulated fashion. It's like saying that FEC regulation of TV as a campaign communication medium prevents you from ranting on your cable public access channel, which it doesn't.
If I'm wrong, prove it, don't tag it to the end of an article submission.
I'm pretty famliar with C and I have the opposite opinion. Things like if(!ptr) bug the crap out of me because you're implying that a pointer is equivalent to or comparable to an int.
Moreover, it drives me up the wall to see code like ptr = 0; to set a pointer to NULL. C is error prone enough without abusing the overlap between 0, \0, and NULL.
Then again, my job is to fix bugs in production C code, so the only code I ever work with is a) always buggy and b) usually poorly written (well...until I get done with it, that is).
tried to ban a device
Yeah, third time in two days, but at least this time it comes with new uninformed bullshit. What more can you ask, right?
I think your only naiveté is believing that the managers who made the decision lend any weight to what their web developers tell them.
First, when you Ask Slashdot for actual research or empirical evidence to support a widely-accepted hypothesis (such as changing passwords often improves security), you get a bunch of anecdotal drivel. I know this from experience...
f /index_fil es/sachas_transfer_report.pdf
l AuthSecuri ty.pdf
t tp://contra costa.edu/hpc/FaST/2003/Bonnie/passwd_sec.pdf
That being said, here's at least one academic paper on the subject:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Brostof
An interesting quote:
"forced password changing causes password problems. The result was highly significant." followed by actual statics demonstrating the significance.
Here's a white paper that seems to argue that complex passwords only provide real protection if you're able to reduce the number of passwords needed (this may just be a marketing pitch for a single-signon product)
http://www.protocom.com/whitepapers/Eva
Most opinions that complex passwords and often changed passwords are more secure are probably based on the presumption that such policies increase the time required to crack a password:
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=h
However, as far as I can tell, no one has really gone out of their way to scientifically compare the effective security provided by various types of password policies in "real world" situations like you describe.
Yeah, you think that, but then again, who would buy a TV that honors the broadcast flag, or a car that has a data recorder over which you have no control, etc. etc. etc.
I don't think this technology will get off the ground, but weirder things have happened. Just need a patent and the right legislation...lobby for a ban on film (you know we have to be worried about the deadly chemicals used in the manufacture and processing of that stuff!), and lobby for a mandate that every device capable of capturing digital photographs implement the technology. That would be a retroactive mandate, of course.
When people don't have a choice, they'll start buying it.
Its competition that makes the company strive for excellence.
No, it's competition that makes the company strive for first-to-market. Excellence is expensive and time consuming. Making an "excellent" product is a last resort for marketers when price, promotion, and hollow features don't win the market share they were looking for. That is, excellence is for people who *know* they won't make it to the market first, no matter what, but still want to compete.
Don't believe that excellence is lower on the list of priorities? If you think about it, the fact that game companies are competing over big-dollar major league exclusivity rights shows how much just slapping "Major League Baseball" or "National Basketball League" or "National Football League" on your game does to improve sales. If someone came up with *the* best baseball video game (whatever you imagine that to be) with fictional teams and players, how do you think its sales would compare to an inferior game with Major League teams and players?
Guess I woke up on the cynical side of the bed this morning...
Well, how long do you have?
- C programs with host names hard-coded in #ifdef...#else...#endif blocks that aren't compiled with the right macro defined for the given environment.
- 20-character wide terminal device that vomited all over itself when the program tried to display a 21 character string, which we only tested on 80 character terms before sending to production
- Intermittent communication failures because of a different version of firmware on a network device in production versus dev/QA.
- WAR files that won't deploy in production because prod runs SunONE and dev runs WSAD.
- System commands not behaving the same because dev was Linux and prod was Unix.
- Integration test failures because someone copied the production encryption key to one dev/test server but not the other.
- Programmers forgot to take the hacks out of the makefile so the program will run in their little world before they compiled the test/QA version of the program.
- Version management commands that are different on different OSes.
- Automated test scripts fail because of some minute difference between dev, test, and QA (that one really pisses me off).
Shall I continue?
You know, I'd like to know the same thing about the CIA's 15 year predictions as Gartner's resear^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrap:
What, if any of their past "predictions" have come true? And is that statistically significantly different from a monkey throwing darts at random predictions...
My money is on "no".
It was so widely reported that my wife asked me when I got home yesterday whether I'd heard about that "neat Mac-mini thing."
go from business user or func-req directly to source code development
e r-off-at-times piece of crap.
You are living in a dream world if you think you can effectively go straight from functional requirements to source code development without a design phase in between. You simply will not end up with quality software. You'll end up with an unmaintainable, non-extensible, almost-gets-the-job-done-but-really-pisses-the-us
I've been on both kinds of development shops. Give me one that does formal design (UML or otherwise) any day.
Of course, that being said, I'd sure like some solid data. Apparently the FAA has commissioned an indepenedent agency to study the effects of cell phones on instrumentation. Results aren't due until 2006.
Anyone heard any further details about the "independent study"?
Then lobby your state government to do it that way; each state gets to determine for themselves how they allocate their electors. Colorado actually brought this issue up in a referendum in this very election.
How in the hell did he get into Gnome after a "sudo rm -Rf /"? Apparently it didn't remove *all* the files...
In Cryptonomicon, what was the information contained in the punched sheets of gold foil? I never could find the answer to that question, and I've never run across anyone else who knew either.
In case there are any pimps out there having trouble with the standard English version of the talk, don't wory. It's been translated into Pimp for you!
In (over)simplified terms, Apple just has to make an economic decision between how much a settlement would cost and how much the Apple brand is worth. If A < B, pay the settlement. If A> B, then spinoff and find a different brand to use for the music-related business.
If you believe their latest 10-Q, the Apple brand is worth about $80 million alone. I wouldn't say that "massively dwarfs" the $25+ million settlement in the first go-round with Apple Corps, but it's still a huge hunk of change.
A) Recognize a troll when you see it.
B) You went on to prove the point! Law is so complex that none of us can hope to know, let alone comprehend, all of it. Yet we must all be accountable for it.
I don't guess I'm in a "life should be fair" mood today.
Not to rehash old arguments, but someone has to:
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
What law?