You folks do realise that Google returns the books after they scan them so they'll still be in the libraries afterwards right? So how does this reduce their availability?
If there was a single experience that you could arrange to have happen to a starting-out programmer that was going to really give them an opportunity to learn something, it would be code maintenance.
A lot of the problems in fresh graduates' code is based on the fact that they've never had deal with code for more than half a semester during an assignment and then it's forgotten. We can simply take the aphorism meant to get people to write neat code and comment "Use comments because in 6 months, your code might as well have been written by a stranger", and apply it to a course.
Have the students write a substantial project as early on in their course as possible
Give them at least a year, ideally two to forget it. Bonus points for them not knowing in advance which project will be treated like this.
Have them significantly extend their code in a way that requires them to understand it. Put some arbirarily high bar to prevent them just giving up and rewriting it (failing, requirement for unweildly refactoring process documentation)
Watch them suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous FORTRAN (or whatever horror they were working in early on).
Profit!
I personally learnt a great deal about what makes for good programming practice by going through a situation of my own making not unlike this. Fortunately it happened early on. While I think a course that actaully shows good techniques for dealing with all of this stuff is really important and probably useful, 75% of the students are going to ignore it as a waste of time unless you've arranged for them to go through an experience as that outlined above so that they'll actually realise what the point of it all is.
Having realised that their secret base is now visible from the air both in their own carefully controlled Google Earth, and in competitor's products, the non-evil geniuses plan to put a huge solar reflector up that can dazzle satellites and helicopters. All that remains is thinking of a plausible cover story...
What windows folk clearly don't get is that on a mac, all the windows aren't mashed together on the task bar, instead only running applications appear in the dock (or on the command-tab switchy thing). So you move between applications with cmd-tab and cycle through the windows of a single application using cmd-`. It's really helpful.
Unfortunately, when you have different applications embedded into another (like a webbrowser) this distinction breaks down. Crashiness aside, it would indeed be interesting to see if someone uses apple's webtoolkit to come up with an ajax-host application that can address these problems.
Actually, blacklists and blocking entire class A spaces still works QUITE well, and will continue to work well for a long time. 90% of my spam is blocked by blacklists before it even hits spamassassin. If I didn't blacklist and just ran everything through spamassassin, I'd need another 5 mail servers. Spamassassin is nice, but is a CPU pig. It is MUCH easier and more cost-effective to whitelist as needed for individual machines / domains / addresses inside a blacklisted zone.
Maybe you are bitter because you have been blacklisted...
It's easier and cheaper to do as you describe, but how much mail do you throw away incorrectly? The thing about blacklisting is that it's near impossible to work out when it's causing you errors.
You're right that I'm bitter. If you're trying to be a good 'net citizen by scanning for viruses etc on outgoing mail then all your mail from what can be an incredibly heterogenous network will tend to come from one of a small number of machines. Those machines are prime targets for inclusion in blacklists, particularly when your mail traffic levels are many tens or hundreds of thousands of messages per hour. Even more so because the blacklist providers have hairtrigger reactions and frequently blacklist servers merely because people who are automatically forwarding their mail to some other location then submit it as spam.
Blacklist providers are, frankly, dangerous cowboys. While a lot of the simpler solutions to spam work nicely for single people or very strict business monocultures, as soon as you deal with large numbers of users with very disparate usage patterns you find that the simple solutions just don't scale, and that other people's simple solutions cause you real angst.
My hunch is telling me that the purveyor of this message is using some
sophisticated means of harnassing zombie machines to send messages, and is
only sending a few messages at a time so that automated blackhole lists
never catch on fast enough. (such as spamhaus)
It's not a 'hunch'. I try to stop spam coming from a large devolved university network with a great number of varyingly maintained windows boxes and many different mail servers. A little over a year ago, spam zombie machines stopped flooding tens of thousands of messages an hour and started leaking out a handful every now and then. A few months later, the email-borne virus folks caught up.
It makes them a lot harder to spot.
For what it's worth, blacklists are effectively useless. Almost all spam now comes from poorly secured workstations and personal machines attached to ISPs and other organisations. All you're going to do with a blacklist is irritate organisations who have users with poorly configured machines. This includes practically everyone. The spammers are just going to move on to another part of their massive botnet, only legitimate email will be blocked.
Likewise, your blocking of entire class A-sized-blocks, particularly as with tight IP space, a lot of blocks are being broken up and moved round, is pretty pointless. Reminds me of a post some years ago by someone who claimed you could stop lots of spam for no loss by blocking mail from all TLDs other than.edu,.gov,.edu, and.net. Ho ho ho.
B>
Are you generally against PE in schools or do you really think that teaching kids to play dodgeball and kickball is markedly superior than letting them play DDR? If DDR motivates kids to be active while they play it and playing softball doesn't, why is it inferior? Seriously, what is your problem other than being smug and shouting out crap from an ivory tower?
Thank you for unknowingly illustrating my point. Yes, I believe teaching sports to kids in school is markedly superior to letting them play some computer game that hides the fact that they're doing activity behind flashy lights. Teaching versus letting. Remember what schools are there for? If you need to distract kids with noise and lights to make them exercise then providing flashy lights and sounds isn't solving the problem. Further, sooner or later the effect of the flashy lights and sounds will wear off and then what? A call for an even more noisy and flashy light-filled distraction to get them to exercise?
Presumably "ivory tower" refers to anyone who doesn't accept DDR as fantastic sport, or who questions your urge to avoid the basis for that sedentary lifestyle you're talking about.
I find the whole "invent entertainment so people go to the gym" thing somewhat distasteful, likewise the idea that schools should include it to try and entice kids to be more active is... shortsighted at best. Fighting games are not exactly a new genre, just a new media wrapped around something that might well be as old as humans.
I see this leading down a slippery slope of building explicit reward systems to regulate every part of healthy life for a populace completely incapable of caring for itself.
There's a lot of people with comprehension problems out there today. Look at the word entice, it's critical in my original post. DDR isn't a way of enticing people to get fit, it's a gimmick based on a current fad that's going to go away as all fads do. I'm not saying the fad, for the few weeks it lasts, doesn't make people exercise, merely that it isn't the road to long or even medium term fitness improvements.
Have you actually seen people play this game before? I don't know what mode I have witnessed the game in but on each occassion the people (guys and girls) are moving pretty vigorously. They jump, twist, turn, step, cross step, crouch, a slap the deck. Amazing amounts of energy are being expended by these kids.
Yes, I'm aware that energy is expended in this pointless occupation, I just question what the value is of making exercise a side-effect or gimmick of some fad that's going to go away in a week or three. How are you going to trick kids into exercising then?
Better to promote exercise in forms that aren't quite so vulnerable to the whim of fashion.
This isn't the online IT arm of the National Enquirer, you know.
The Inq isn't always right, but what the do tend to have is a lot of news-breaking stuff that they're (well, Mike) is willing to publish regardless of the consequences when the corporate heads find out there's a leak. Thats' why Mike got eased out of The Register when it went more corporate to form the Inq in the first place.
Those who have been following it for a while will remember all the appearances of leaked memos from Compaq (ex-DEC) insiders who were willing to leak happily to someone of the old school who was interested in seeing how the whole fiasco was turning out. Compaq/HP even started internal witchhunts looking for the leakers.
Regardless, the only real problem people might have with the Inq is they can't distinguish between an opinion piece and direct reporting, or can't accept that while the information as presented might be correct, it doesn't ensure that interpretive parts also follow.
I'm probably missing something, but how exactly is a computer game that forces people to jump around to play going to entice people to become fitter?
I find the exercise I get cyling to the office along the river while listening to a BBC news podcast difficult to beat, except for the odd game of squash. At the time time I find it really difficult to believe that anyone could subject themselves to this sort of rat-racing occupation, let alone build one.
Some jobs have a direct, measurable effect on the bottom line. Bet they aren't the ones being cut.
And it's for this precise reason that companies in trouble almost always fire all of the engineers and people producing product while ramping up the sales force.
The next step is left as an exercise for the reader.
Fortunately for the world, the "engineers" at HP that this affects are no longer in a position to make much of a difference to anything.
Just before Carly started killing off divisions, no matter how profitable that didn't meet the 25% growth target of the (unprofitable) PC business, the important parts of HP, medical devices, measurement and instrumentation, all the important engineering parts in short were spun off into Agilent.
Since then, we've seen the Itanic sink without trace, consumers getting increasingly angry about HP's gouging for toner and consumables in their printer lines and the place turn into a budget PC shop barely able to keep itself afloat.
HP acquired compaq to get hold of the service division that Compaq acquired DEC to get. Unfortunately, PC-vendors don't understand what makes a big-iron company like DEC tick, or how to keep service customers happy so the outsourcing work that Compaq and now HP have taken on to 'leverage' that acquisition have pretty uniformly tanked in the face of competent companies out to provide real service, rather than get a foot in the door to sell their own PC merchandise.
In short, while it's a great shame that HP is doing this, the HP that we all think about when the name comes up, the RPN calculator folks, the makers of CROs and medical whatsits, the PA-RISC workstation company, has either fled or is long since dead. RIP HP.
Code reviews by cow-orkers are nothing new. Ed Yourden and many others were publishing books in the late 80s and early 90s showing that it was a really good way to get code that was nicer and had fewer defects. To say nothing of Brooks's programming unit teams from over 25 years ago.
It's nice that someone is waving the security flag to promote it, but a little sad that everyone wasn't already doing it.
I'm amazed that no-one has mentioned Alpha before this. Remember how Intel got the dregs of the DEC people? Nice to see some of it surface.
The basic stupid assumption of the VLIW people is that magical compiler technology would appear that would allow them to generate code that made use of the chips. Having software critically depend for performance of non-fixed CPU architectures such as numbers of the various execution units and types is sheer lunacy. Anyway, what the Itanic people forgot was that any advance in compiler technology would benefit the Alpha/OOO folks just as much.
For a long time, Unix systems have required near-symbiotic sysadmins who are willing to become conversant with tiny system details and be available nearly around-the-clock to maintain their systems. They're required to be programmers and librarians and evaluate software. They have to manage the frequently terrifying upgrade procedures inherent in highly configurable systems. This in comparison to the several levels of system experitise generally seen and required in VMS or IBM shops.
How would you say that linux is moving away from the need to have highly specialised linux people available on tap to be deployed to any advantage? Has it, and where do the sudden profusion of linux distribution vendors and providers fit into this?
B>
Further to the other poster, the non-destructiveness of this sort of scanning is a little overplayed. Most of these sorts of systems, particularly the high resolution ones, dump a lot of energy into their sample which causes bleaching and other destructive effects.
Re:It has NOT been done before, you insensitive cl
on
Anatomy of a Virus
·
· Score: 1
From a virologist point of view, this is very much NEWS, especially compared to the 'news' we usually get in/. about some minor obscure variation of piece of software.
Really? Looks like a minor variation in image processing software that appears to pull more detail about a small virus. This isn't a revolution in imaging technology. I'm a little curious how the PR people managed to confuse 'control' with 'postprocessing' or 'reconstruction', but not too much. PR people are beyond mere surprise.
Specifically, a quick glance at the Nature article tells me that all they've done new is remove some of the assumptions of symmetry, weakening that assumption to the assumption that all of these viruses are identical and then very carefully reconstructed a 3d map of the virus based on reassembling these (thousand) of images from slightly different angles.
Nothing to do with control. If they had control, they would have many many images of a single virus and no assumptions at all.
Also the jiang-phage image appears to show much more useful detail.
It certainly does. Makes you wonder just how much of that reconstructed detail is real, doesn't it.
While PHP is a truly awful language that strives against every programming principle and the very act of writingin maintainable code, the problem is not the language.
The problem is the sort of people that PHP as a language was designed for. It was designed for non-programmers and kids to easily hack together vaguely working web applications for pocket money or sweets. It excels at this, cast your eye around the uncountable fray of PHP programming forums and the people using them. (Witness also that people outside this set avoid PHP with great vigour).
However, people who like PHP are most definitely not the people you want to have writing a CMS that holds actual data. MySource is a great example of this. Because the people who designed MySource are basically idiots, a site with 5000-odd pages comes up against issues where on each page render every child page (And its children) has to be individually checked for access rights so the side menu can be generated. As a result, for the above-mentioned 5000-page site, on a fast 2-processor server with gobs of memory, serving a single page takes about 3 seconds.
3 whole seconds.
PHP programmers are the sort of people who write these ridiculous piece of code, and leave the issue scattered through the whole source tree without any hint of abstraction so that fixing it becomes a major rewrite. PHP programmers are the sort of people who release a 'commercial grade' CMS without having ever tested it with 5000 pages.
PHP programmers are great for small websites paid in sweets, but don't use anything they've touched for a CMS.
Just to insert a little sanity here. In Australia, most copyright violations are prosecuted in the civil courts (exceptions include sale of couterfeit goos, called 'passing off'). It is only in corrupt countries where the media corporations can easily buy new laws that such things have fallen under criminal prosecution.
Let's not even begin to talk about the DCMA, the shiny new laws which make videotaping a movie in a theatre more heavily punished than several types of killing, or the perpetual copyright on Mickey Mouse or anything else that american corporations bother to pay supreme court justices for.
They use all text based ads that are effective and not thrown in our face like billboards, or product placement ads in movies, just simple text ads that are often less than 10 words.
I hate to mention this but when I was looking at the google AdSense site today, not only did they have graphical ads as an option, but it was selected by default for new users. Poor timing on someone's part.
Slashdot Mirror
You folks do realise that Google returns the books after they scan them so they'll still be in the libraries afterwards right? So how does this reduce their availability?
If there was a single experience that you could arrange to have happen to a starting-out programmer that was going to really give them an opportunity to learn something, it would be code maintenance.
A lot of the problems in fresh graduates' code is based on the fact that they've never had deal with code for more than half a semester during an assignment and then it's forgotten. We can simply take the aphorism meant to get people to write neat code and comment "Use comments because in 6 months, your code might as well have been written by a stranger", and apply it to a course.
I personally learnt a great deal about what makes for good programming practice by going through a situation of my own making not unlike this. Fortunately it happened early on. While I think a course that actaully shows good techniques for dealing with all of this stuff is really important and probably useful, 75% of the students are going to ignore it as a waste of time unless you've arranged for them to go through an experience as that outlined above so that they'll actually realise what the point of it all is.
Having realised that their secret base is now visible from the air both in their own carefully controlled Google Earth, and in competitor's products, the non-evil geniuses plan to put a huge solar reflector up that can dazzle satellites and helicopters. All that remains is thinking of a plausible cover story...
What windows folk clearly don't get is that on a mac, all the windows aren't mashed together on the task bar, instead only running applications appear in the dock (or on the command-tab switchy thing). So you move between applications with cmd-tab and cycle through the windows of a single application using cmd-`. It's really helpful.
Unfortunately, when you have different applications embedded into another (like a webbrowser) this distinction breaks down. Crashiness aside, it would indeed be interesting to see if someone uses apple's webtoolkit to come up with an ajax-host application that can address these problems.
B>
It's easier and cheaper to do as you describe, but how much mail do you throw away incorrectly? The thing about blacklisting is that it's near impossible to work out when it's causing you errors.
You're right that I'm bitter. If you're trying to be a good 'net citizen by scanning for viruses etc on outgoing mail then all your mail from what can be an incredibly heterogenous network will tend to come from one of a small number of machines. Those machines are prime targets for inclusion in blacklists, particularly when your mail traffic levels are many tens or hundreds of thousands of messages per hour. Even more so because the blacklist providers have hairtrigger reactions and frequently blacklist servers merely because people who are automatically forwarding their mail to some other location then submit it as spam.
Blacklist providers are, frankly, dangerous cowboys. While a lot of the simpler solutions to spam work nicely for single people or very strict business monocultures, as soon as you deal with large numbers of users with very disparate usage patterns you find that the simple solutions just don't scale, and that other people's simple solutions cause you real angst.
It's not a 'hunch'. I try to stop spam coming from a large devolved university network with a great number of varyingly maintained windows boxes and many different mail servers. A little over a year ago, spam zombie machines stopped flooding tens of thousands of messages an hour and started leaking out a handful every now and then. A few months later, the email-borne virus folks caught up.
It makes them a lot harder to spot.
For what it's worth, blacklists are effectively useless. Almost all spam now comes from poorly secured workstations and personal machines attached to ISPs and other organisations. All you're going to do with a blacklist is irritate organisations who have users with poorly configured machines. This includes practically everyone. The spammers are just going to move on to another part of their massive botnet, only legitimate email will be blocked.
Likewise, your blocking of entire class A-sized-blocks, particularly as with tight IP space, a lot of blocks are being broken up and moved round, is pretty pointless. Reminds me of a post some years ago by someone who claimed you could stop lots of spam for no loss by blocking mail from all TLDs other than .edu, .gov, .edu, and .net. Ho ho ho.
B>
Thank you for unknowingly illustrating my point. Yes, I believe teaching sports to kids in school is markedly superior to letting them play some computer game that hides the fact that they're doing activity behind flashy lights. Teaching versus letting. Remember what schools are there for? If you need to distract kids with noise and lights to make them exercise then providing flashy lights and sounds isn't solving the problem. Further, sooner or later the effect of the flashy lights and sounds will wear off and then what? A call for an even more noisy and flashy light-filled distraction to get them to exercise?
Presumably "ivory tower" refers to anyone who doesn't accept DDR as fantastic sport, or who questions your urge to avoid the basis for that sedentary lifestyle you're talking about.
I find the whole "invent entertainment so people go to the gym" thing somewhat distasteful, likewise the idea that schools should include it to try and entice kids to be more active is... shortsighted at best. Fighting games are not exactly a new genre, just a new media wrapped around something that might well be as old as humans.
I see this leading down a slippery slope of building explicit reward systems to regulate every part of healthy life for a populace completely incapable of caring for itself.
There's a lot of people with comprehension problems out there today. Look at the word entice, it's critical in my original post. DDR isn't a way of enticing people to get fit, it's a gimmick based on a current fad that's going to go away as all fads do. I'm not saying the fad, for the few weeks it lasts, doesn't make people exercise, merely that it isn't the road to long or even medium term fitness improvements.
Are we absolutely sure that this 'Peter Misek' isn't just Dvorak in a wig?
Yes, I'm aware that energy is expended in this pointless occupation, I just question what the value is of making exercise a side-effect or gimmick of some fad that's going to go away in a week or three. How are you going to trick kids into exercising then?
Better to promote exercise in forms that aren't quite so vulnerable to the whim of fashion.
This isn't the online IT arm of the National Enquirer, you know.
The Inq isn't always right, but what the do tend to have is a lot of news-breaking stuff that they're (well, Mike) is willing to publish regardless of the consequences when the corporate heads find out there's a leak. Thats' why Mike got eased out of The Register when it went more corporate to form the Inq in the first place.
Those who have been following it for a while will remember all the appearances of leaked memos from Compaq (ex-DEC) insiders who were willing to leak happily to someone of the old school who was interested in seeing how the whole fiasco was turning out. Compaq/HP even started internal witchhunts looking for the leakers.
Regardless, the only real problem people might have with the Inq is they can't distinguish between an opinion piece and direct reporting, or can't accept that while the information as presented might be correct, it doesn't ensure that interpretive parts also follow.
I'm probably missing something, but how exactly is a computer game that forces people to jump around to play going to entice people to become fitter?
I find the exercise I get cyling to the office along the river while listening to a BBC news podcast difficult to beat, except for the odd game of squash. At the time time I find it really difficult to believe that anyone could subject themselves to this sort of rat-racing occupation, let alone build one.
And it's for this precise reason that companies in trouble almost always fire all of the engineers and people producing product while ramping up the sales force.
The next step is left as an exercise for the reader.
Fortunately for the world, the "engineers" at HP that this affects are no longer in a position to make much of a difference to anything.
Just before Carly started killing off divisions, no matter how profitable that didn't meet the 25% growth target of the (unprofitable) PC business, the important parts of HP, medical devices, measurement and instrumentation, all the important engineering parts in short were spun off into Agilent.
Since then, we've seen the Itanic sink without trace, consumers getting increasingly angry about HP's gouging for toner and consumables in their printer lines and the place turn into a budget PC shop barely able to keep itself afloat.
HP acquired compaq to get hold of the service division that Compaq acquired DEC to get. Unfortunately, PC-vendors don't understand what makes a big-iron company like DEC tick, or how to keep service customers happy so the outsourcing work that Compaq and now HP have taken on to 'leverage' that acquisition have pretty uniformly tanked in the face of competent companies out to provide real service, rather than get a foot in the door to sell their own PC merchandise.
In short, while it's a great shame that HP is doing this, the HP that we all think about when the name comes up, the RPN calculator folks, the makers of CROs and medical whatsits, the PA-RISC workstation company, has either fled or is long since dead. RIP HP.
Code reviews by cow-orkers are nothing new. Ed Yourden and many others were publishing books in the late 80s and early 90s showing that it was a really good way to get code that was nicer and had fewer defects. To say nothing of Brooks's programming unit teams from over 25 years ago.
It's nice that someone is waving the security flag to promote it, but a little sad that everyone wasn't already doing it.
And the geopolitical sensitivies of a wire coathanger?
I'm amazed that no-one has mentioned Alpha before this. Remember how Intel got the dregs of the DEC people? Nice to see some of it surface.
The basic stupid assumption of the VLIW people is that magical compiler technology would appear that would allow them to generate code that made use of the chips. Having software critically depend for performance of non-fixed CPU architectures such as numbers of the various execution units and types is sheer lunacy. Anyway, what the Itanic people forgot was that any advance in compiler technology would benefit the Alpha/OOO folks just as much.
So you've never heard of glibc, or for that matter glibc++? Must be nice.
For a long time, Unix systems have required near-symbiotic sysadmins who are willing to become conversant with tiny system details and be available nearly around-the-clock to maintain their systems. They're required to be programmers and librarians and evaluate software. They have to manage the frequently terrifying upgrade procedures inherent in highly configurable systems. This in comparison to the several levels of system experitise generally seen and required in VMS or IBM shops.
How would you say that linux is moving away from the need to have highly specialised linux people available on tap to be deployed to any advantage? Has it, and where do the sudden profusion of linux distribution vendors and providers fit into this? B>
Further to the other poster, the non-destructiveness of this sort of scanning is a little overplayed. Most of these sorts of systems, particularly the high resolution ones, dump a lot of energy into their sample which causes bleaching and other destructive effects.
Really? Looks like a minor variation in image processing software that appears to pull more detail about a small virus. This isn't a revolution in imaging technology. I'm a little curious how the PR people managed to confuse 'control' with 'postprocessing' or 'reconstruction', but not too much. PR people are beyond mere surprise.
Specifically, a quick glance at the Nature article tells me that all they've done new is remove some of the assumptions of symmetry, weakening that assumption to the assumption that all of these viruses are identical and then very carefully reconstructed a 3d map of the virus based on reassembling these (thousand) of images from slightly different angles.
Nothing to do with control. If they had control, they would have many many images of a single virus and no assumptions at all.
It certainly does. Makes you wonder just how much of that reconstructed detail is real, doesn't it.While PHP is a truly awful language that strives against every programming principle and the very act of writingin maintainable code, the problem is not the language.
The problem is the sort of people that PHP as a language was designed for. It was designed for non-programmers and kids to easily hack together vaguely working web applications for pocket money or sweets. It excels at this, cast your eye around the uncountable fray of PHP programming forums and the people using them. (Witness also that people outside this set avoid PHP with great vigour).
However, people who like PHP are most definitely not the people you want to have writing a CMS that holds actual data. MySource is a great example of this. Because the people who designed MySource are basically idiots, a site with 5000-odd pages comes up against issues where on each page render every child page (And its children) has to be individually checked for access rights so the side menu can be generated. As a result, for the above-mentioned 5000-page site, on a fast 2-processor server with gobs of memory, serving a single page takes about 3 seconds.
3 whole seconds.
PHP programmers are the sort of people who write these ridiculous piece of code, and leave the issue scattered through the whole source tree without any hint of abstraction so that fixing it becomes a major rewrite. PHP programmers are the sort of people who release a 'commercial grade' CMS without having ever tested it with 5000 pages.
PHP programmers are great for small websites paid in sweets, but don't use anything they've touched for a CMS.
Just to insert a little sanity here. In Australia, most copyright violations are prosecuted in the civil courts (exceptions include sale of couterfeit goos, called 'passing off'). It is only in corrupt countries where the media corporations can easily buy new laws that such things have fallen under criminal prosecution.
Let's not even begin to talk about the DCMA, the shiny new laws which make videotaping a movie in a theatre more heavily punished than several types of killing, or the perpetual copyright on Mickey Mouse or anything else that american corporations bother to pay supreme court justices for.