"What looks best on a resume" depends entirely on who is reading the resume. If you want to work I.T., and simply have a lot of I.T. experience, then you have a good resume. But if you want to work for Microsoft research, then that same resume is worthless.
So, your first priority should be figuring out what you want to do. The best way to do this is to try different things. Get internships. Try everything. Then make a decision; this will tell you what degree to get.
If Chinese people do it, it's spying. If westerners do it (such as via twitter, or even wikileaks) it's just social media.
Nah, it's more than twitter; GP made it sound like the "informers" are more innocent than they actually are. It sounds like he's talking about cases like that of Chi Mak (which is sort of an archetypal case). Yes, he wasn't particularly professional, but he did know damn well that he was passing along secrets he wasn't supposed to:
At one point, Chiu said to her husband that the "things" his brother was asking him to take "are certainly against the law," states an FBI affidavit.
we cannot directly measure this without knocking the electron out of its orbit.
I'd thought that this oft-repeated interpretation of the uncertainty principle was bogus, and that in fact what it really comes down to is inherent properties of windowing the Fourier Transform. Consider a short-time Fourier Transform (STFT): If your window is large, than you have high resolution in frequency but don't know "when" different frequencies "occur," whereas if your window is small, then you know "when" things happen more accurately but you lose resolution in frequency.
If a layman could understand it, it wouldn't be worth publishing a scholarly paper about it.
Naturally, the converse -- "If a layman couldn't understand it, then it must be worth publishing" -- isn't true, but it's a reasonably effective way to increase your publication count.
The car industry discovered that it was impossible to build cars without cross licensing between all the major manufacturers in the 1950s.
The same goes for the microelectronics industry. Intel, AMD, IBM... they're all cross-licensed to the hilt. Patents are issued very liberally, and the companies don't protest each other's obvious patents, because they know they'll just cross license them effectively-for-free anyway ("I'll pay you ten million dollars for your portfolio, and you'll pay me ten million for mine").
The only thing this achieves in the end, as sapphire_wyvern pointed out, is to create a high barrier of entry to incumbents.
What this shows is that firms which take patents are more likely to be involved in patent lawsuits. So the whole "we took defensive patents, now see how we need them" becomes a self-justifying circle.
Isn't what you're saying circular? TomTom didn't get into this dispute because it had patents; it got into it because Microsoft did. But now, because it has patents, it and Microsoft will eventually be able to settle with a cross-licensing scheme -- whereas if it didn't, then it wouldn't have any bargaining chips.
The only "circle" I see isn't a circle at all but rather a collective action problem: If all companies voluntarily agreed to avoid this patent nonsense, then they'd all be better off. But the individual incentives encourage patenting. See the Tragedy of the Commons, the Prisoner's Dilemma, or any other canonical example of a collective action problem.
Ack! (I've read through the bug reports more closely, and am alarmed by what I'm reading. TFA made it sound much more innocuous.) I hereby retract my previous posts that pooh-poohed this.
Ummm... it deals correctly with files of any size. It just loses recent data if your system crashes before it has flushed what it's got in RAM to disk. That's the case for pretty much any filesystem; it's just a matter of degree, and how "recent" is recent.
Meh, this is crap that happens only when the system crashes, and is pretty much unavoidable if you're doing a lot of caching in memory -- which, coincidentally, is what you need to do to maximize performance. This doesn't sound like the filesystem's "fault" or the application's "fault;" it's just the way things are. Everybody knows that if you don't cleanly unmount, most bets are off.
Lots of people do just this. It's not that they need to. It's that having a printer in their office is apparently more convenient than getting out of their chair to grab printouts from the big one directly outside their door. I also think it's a status thing. You get your own office; you put a printer in it to demonstrate your awesomeness to the lowly cubicle-dwellers who come to visit.
You know, I'm starting to think that my arguments above are bogus, and my real complaints are just with the user interface and the MSDN documentation.
Mostly, I wish I could use runas without launching a new command window. When I look at it this way, this is a much smaller complaint.
As for runas in the same window: Ostensibly, this can be achieved with LogonUser and CreateProcessAsUser, if you clear the CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE bit of CreateProcessAsUser's dwCreationFlags argument. However, this does not actually work; a new window is created regardless of that bit's setting -- behavior which is not described in the MSDN documentation. I played with a workaround involving hiding the new window and copying its input and output using named pipes, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it and didn't get it to work.
Any thoughts on how such a thing could be gotten to work?
I once tried to write a "sudo for Cygwin" that would bring up the UAC confirmation box and run a program with associated elevated permissions in Vista. (Other people have written programs that they call "sudo for Vista," but none of them do what I want. In particular, they don't run programs in the same console.) In the process of poking through the security APIs, I learned a little about what a mess UAC is uder the hood.
Windows NT/XP has a perfectly good security model, if only people would use it. In some ways it's more sophisticated than Linux's: For instance, file permissions are more fine-grained on NT. The problem really hasn't been with XP/NT; it's been "social:" it was the culture of software development on Windows to too often require, unnecessarily, that users have administrative rights.
Microsoft's solution in Vista was to restrict the rights of administrators and add GUI confirmation boxes. This was the wrong solution, I think. In my (admittedly armchair-quarterback's) judgment, the right one would have been to,
1 - Keep traditional XP-style administrator and user accounts, with roughly the same privileges as they'd always had.
2 - Require OEMs to ship computers with user, rather than admin accounts, enabled. Randomly-generated default admin passwords should be written on a sticker on the front of the PC's case.
3 - Add a "sudo" mechanism, perhaps with the following modifications from 'nix sudo to make it easier for novices:
... a - The sudo prompt pops up automatically when a program attempts to do certain classes of things for which it does not have privileges. This differs from Linux, in which a program will simply fail with an "Insufficient permissions" error; this would be pretty opaque to novice users I think.
... b - "sudo" could be configured (and perhaps should be by default) so that it is sufficient to click a "confirm" button in lieu of typing in a password.
This is almost what UAC is. But the devil is in the details. What Microsoft actually did was make "Administrator" accounts into something more like "user" accounts, and add a level of privilege yet higher than administrator. But it feels tacked-on, and not really "at home" in the NT security model, which in fact provides plenty of control on its own over what rights different users and groups have, if only it were used correctly.
In other words, Microsoft shouldn't have restricted Admin accounts in this poorly-documented way; it should have instead added a sudo mechanism to make it more feasible to run as a User, and kept the nicely-documented and well-designed security model that NT has always had but people have simply never used.
If the Internet fsking worked the way it was supposed to, I wouldn't need some other server; my own machine would be a first-class citizen, and so long as I could remember its IP address I could SSH in.
I used to do just this. I was at a university which had a very nice, rather open network, and I could access my machine from anywhere in the world. Why bother even carrying a laptop around when you can x-forward your machine to any of a thousand terminals scattered around campus? But these days I'm at another university, and their network is locked down in arcane and nondeterministic ways, so that sometimes I can access my machine, sometimes I can't, and god only knows why. The one thing you can reliably do is surf the web.
...which is why we're cramming all this bullshit into web browsers to begin with. We've kept the Web working, but broken the Internet.
A reasonable practical concern. However, it's just a patent for "futuretech," not a practical invention (yet?). Also, I don't know how accurate small phased-array radar systems are, or by how much you could improve the accuracy of your estimate of the bullet's state by incorporating a dynamic model (using, e.g., a Kalman filter). But I think that both questions need answering before this idea, even with "existing" technology, can be dismissed.
I'm not posting to disagree with you because I believe in an afterlife. I don't, per-se. But consciousness amazes the fuck out of me, and the amount of certainty you express seems to me to be at odds with just how amazing it actually is, especially given that you (and I) have zero firsthand experience with the experience in question -- death.
That we experience things is incredible. Where does consciousness "live?" I can explain the outward behaviors of organisms by saying that they are governed by amazingly complicated differential equations that give rise to all of this. But what about consciousness, experience? If this really is the true nature of things -- and, maybe, it is -- then differential equations think and feel and experience, in their own way. Why should we be different in anything but degree from an atom? And what does an atom experience, running the Schrodinger (or, Dirac) equation at its heart? More importantly, what do/our/ constituent atoms, molecules, proteins feel? Surely they carry on after our organs have stopped working. How much of our-"selves" is in them?
I use Ubuntu, but not because it's fast. A clean Windows XP box sitting behind a properly-configured firewall is a heck of a lot more responsive than Ubuntu or Kubuntu: The GUI and window manager are more lightweight, there are fewer abstraction layers in the way (X-Windows is awesome for its network transparency, but lightweight it is not -- doubly so when running KDE/Gnome), and you can usually expect the drivers and software to be more-optimized on Windows.
Try running a Youtube video fullscreen on a 'buntu box. Single digit framerates are not fast. Try playing a video in mplayer, or a DVD: It's usually fast enough, but it's obviously doing more in software than the equivalent Windows codecs, because videos stutter that used to play fine when the same machine ran XP.
No, Ubuntu is in fact slower. For me it makes up for this in flexibility, configurability, and (sometimes -- it really depends what I'm trying to do) ease of use. But if I really wanted performance, I'd either run a fresh, clean, locked-down XP, or a stripped-down Debian install, depending on what I needed.
I've worked with IT teachers who teach that the main components of a PC are a monitor and a hard drive "which contains all the other bits of the computer, including the CDROM".
My god I can't stand that either!!
I think it reflects a problem with the language, though. What do you call the case and everything in it? What do you call the collection of stuff including this and the monitor?
Me, I say that "case + everything in it" = "computer," and although "computer" is also used colloquially to refer to this+monitor, in fact there is no real "correct" word for this collection.
If we gave people good words for every item in the hierarchy of "stuff" maybe this confusion would go away.
Though perhaps this sort of confusion is unavoidable, and reflects the arbitrariness of the lines we draw around "units of computation." What's a core? What's a processor? What if my machine is running SETI@Home; what's the "computer" in that case? Is it the collection of all the machines running SETI@Home? Does it include the routers and switches in-between? Or, back inside the case: Does my nVidia card running CUDA count as a processor? What about my FPU? How important is it philosophically that two things are or are not located on the same chip? And what, fundamentally, are REALLY the differences between hard drive, RAM, and cache? Aren't these not fundamental concepts, but rather a hack to deal with the perhaps temporary practical matter that "storage" is either fast or cheap but not both? Maybe the problems with the language reflect an uncertainty about what computation "is" which, though perhaps not really understood or articulated by most people, is at least "in the air" in the modern world.
Slashdot Mirror
Or just bigger than a bus...
"What looks best on a resume" depends entirely on who is reading the resume. If you want to work I.T., and simply have a lot of I.T. experience, then you have a good resume. But if you want to work for Microsoft research, then that same resume is worthless.
So, your first priority should be figuring out what you want to do. The best way to do this is to try different things. Get internships. Try everything. Then make a decision; this will tell you what degree to get.
If Chinese people do it, it's spying. If westerners do it (such as via twitter, or even wikileaks) it's just social media.
Nah, it's more than twitter; GP made it sound like the "informers" are more innocent than they actually are. It sounds like he's talking about cases like that of Chi Mak (which is sort of an archetypal case). Yes, he wasn't particularly professional, but he did know damn well that he was passing along secrets he wasn't supposed to:
At one point, Chiu said to her husband that the "things" his brother was asking him to take "are certainly against the law," states an FBI affidavit.
in response to TomTom notifying them of infringement.
Oh, I'd missed that part of the story... Why on earth would TomTom do such a thing?
we cannot directly measure this without knocking the electron out of its orbit.
I'd thought that this oft-repeated interpretation of the uncertainty principle was bogus, and that in fact what it really comes down to is inherent properties of windowing the Fourier Transform. Consider a short-time Fourier Transform (STFT): If your window is large, than you have high resolution in frequency but don't know "when" different frequencies "occur," whereas if your window is small, then you know "when" things happen more accurately but you lose resolution in frequency.
If a layman could understand it, it wouldn't be worth publishing a scholarly paper about it.
Naturally, the converse -- "If a layman couldn't understand it, then it must be worth publishing" -- isn't true, but it's a reasonably effective way to increase your publication count.
[/cynicism]
The car industry discovered that it was impossible to build cars without cross licensing between all the major manufacturers in the 1950s.
The same goes for the microelectronics industry. Intel, AMD, IBM... they're all cross-licensed to the hilt. Patents are issued very liberally, and the companies don't protest each other's obvious patents, because they know they'll just cross license them effectively-for-free anyway ("I'll pay you ten million dollars for your portfolio, and you'll pay me ten million for mine").
The only thing this achieves in the end, as sapphire_wyvern pointed out, is to create a high barrier of entry to incumbents.
What this shows is that firms which take patents are more likely to be involved in patent lawsuits. So the whole "we took defensive patents, now see how we need them" becomes a self-justifying circle.
Isn't what you're saying circular? TomTom didn't get into this dispute because it had patents; it got into it because Microsoft did. But now, because it has patents, it and Microsoft will eventually be able to settle with a cross-licensing scheme -- whereas if it didn't, then it wouldn't have any bargaining chips.
The only "circle" I see isn't a circle at all but rather a collective action problem: If all companies voluntarily agreed to avoid this patent nonsense, then they'd all be better off. But the individual incentives encourage patenting. See the Tragedy of the Commons, the Prisoner's Dilemma, or any other canonical example of a collective action problem.
Ack! (I've read through the bug reports more closely, and am alarmed by what I'm reading. TFA made it sound much more innocuous.) I hereby retract my previous posts that pooh-poohed this.
(Mod this guy up, Informative.)
Ummm... it deals correctly with files of any size. It just loses recent data if your system crashes before it has flushed what it's got in RAM to disk. That's the case for pretty much any filesystem; it's just a matter of degree, and how "recent" is recent.
Meh, this is crap that happens only when the system crashes, and is pretty much unavoidable if you're doing a lot of caching in memory -- which, coincidentally, is what you need to do to maximize performance. This doesn't sound like the filesystem's "fault" or the application's "fault;" it's just the way things are. Everybody knows that if you don't cleanly unmount, most bets are off.
Impeccable logic, albeit entirely useless. Might you happen to be a mathematician, sir?
Why bother inventing when you can be a patent troll instead and predict broad classes of "inventions" ahead of time without doing any actual work?
Lots of people do just this. It's not that they need to. It's that having a printer in their office is apparently more convenient than getting out of their chair to grab printouts from the big one directly outside their door. I also think it's a status thing. You get your own office; you put a printer in it to demonstrate your awesomeness to the lowly cubicle-dwellers who come to visit.
You know, I'm starting to think that my arguments above are bogus, and my real complaints are just with the user interface and the MSDN documentation.
Mostly, I wish I could use runas without launching a new command window. When I look at it this way, this is a much smaller complaint.
As for runas in the same window: Ostensibly, this can be achieved with LogonUser and CreateProcessAsUser, if you clear the CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE bit of CreateProcessAsUser's dwCreationFlags argument. However, this does not actually work; a new window is created regardless of that bit's setting -- behavior which is not described in the MSDN documentation. I played with a workaround involving hiding the new window and copying its input and output using named pipes, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it and didn't get it to work.
Any thoughts on how such a thing could be gotten to work?
I agree in spirit, but the implementation is bad.
I once tried to write a "sudo for Cygwin" that would bring up the UAC confirmation box and run a program with associated elevated permissions in Vista. (Other people have written programs that they call "sudo for Vista," but none of them do what I want. In particular, they don't run programs in the same console.) In the process of poking through the security APIs, I learned a little about what a mess UAC is uder the hood.
Windows NT/XP has a perfectly good security model, if only people would use it. In some ways it's more sophisticated than Linux's: For instance, file permissions are more fine-grained on NT. The problem really hasn't been with XP/NT; it's been "social:" it was the culture of software development on Windows to too often require, unnecessarily, that users have administrative rights.
Microsoft's solution in Vista was to restrict the rights of administrators and add GUI confirmation boxes. This was the wrong solution, I think. In my (admittedly armchair-quarterback's) judgment, the right one would have been to,
1 - Keep traditional XP-style administrator and user accounts, with roughly the same privileges as they'd always had.
2 - Require OEMs to ship computers with user, rather than admin accounts, enabled. Randomly-generated default admin passwords should be written on a sticker on the front of the PC's case.
3 - Add a "sudo" mechanism, perhaps with the following modifications from 'nix sudo to make it easier for novices:
... a - The sudo prompt pops up automatically when a program attempts to do certain classes of things for which it does not have privileges. This differs from Linux, in which a program will simply fail with an "Insufficient permissions" error; this would be pretty opaque to novice users I think.
... b - "sudo" could be configured (and perhaps should be by default) so that it is sufficient to click a "confirm" button in lieu of typing in a password.
This is almost what UAC is. But the devil is in the details. What Microsoft actually did was make "Administrator" accounts into something more like "user" accounts, and add a level of privilege yet higher than administrator. But it feels tacked-on, and not really "at home" in the NT security model, which in fact provides plenty of control on its own over what rights different users and groups have, if only it were used correctly.
In other words, Microsoft shouldn't have restricted Admin accounts in this poorly-documented way; it should have instead added a sudo mechanism to make it more feasible to run as a User, and kept the nicely-documented and well-designed security model that NT has always had but people have simply never used.
It might be a little flamey, but the point is valid, mods...
universal access
If the Internet fsking worked the way it was supposed to, I wouldn't need some other server; my own machine would be a first-class citizen, and so long as I could remember its IP address I could SSH in.
I used to do just this. I was at a university which had a very nice, rather open network, and I could access my machine from anywhere in the world. Why bother even carrying a laptop around when you can x-forward your machine to any of a thousand terminals scattered around campus? But these days I'm at another university, and their network is locked down in arcane and nondeterministic ways, so that sometimes I can access my machine, sometimes I can't, and god only knows why. The one thing you can reliably do is surf the web.
...which is why we're cramming all this bullshit into web browsers to begin with. We've kept the Web working, but broken the Internet.
Apart from "xhost +" (which is a bad security move), I wholeheartedly agree. This is what X was designed for.
A reasonable practical concern. However, it's just a patent for "futuretech," not a practical invention (yet?). Also, I don't know how accurate small phased-array radar systems are, or by how much you could improve the accuracy of your estimate of the bullet's state by incorporating a dynamic model (using, e.g., a Kalman filter). But I think that both questions need answering before this idea, even with "existing" technology, can be dismissed.
I'm not posting to disagree with you because I believe in an afterlife. I don't, per-se. But consciousness amazes the fuck out of me, and the amount of certainty you express seems to me to be at odds with just how amazing it actually is, especially given that you (and I) have zero firsthand experience with the experience in question -- death.
That we experience things is incredible. Where does consciousness "live?" I can explain the outward behaviors of organisms by saying that they are governed by amazingly complicated differential equations that give rise to all of this. But what about consciousness, experience? If this really is the true nature of things -- and, maybe, it is -- then differential equations think and feel and experience, in their own way. Why should we be different in anything but degree from an atom? And what does an atom experience, running the Schrodinger (or, Dirac) equation at its heart? More importantly, what do /our/ constituent atoms, molecules, proteins feel? Surely they carry on after our organs have stopped working. How much of our-"selves" is in them?
I don't know. Nobody does.
I use Ubuntu, but not because it's fast. A clean Windows XP box sitting behind a properly-configured firewall is a heck of a lot more responsive than Ubuntu or Kubuntu: The GUI and window manager are more lightweight, there are fewer abstraction layers in the way (X-Windows is awesome for its network transparency, but lightweight it is not -- doubly so when running KDE/Gnome), and you can usually expect the drivers and software to be more-optimized on Windows.
Try running a Youtube video fullscreen on a 'buntu box. Single digit framerates are not fast. Try playing a video in mplayer, or a DVD: It's usually fast enough, but it's obviously doing more in software than the equivalent Windows codecs, because videos stutter that used to play fine when the same machine ran XP.
No, Ubuntu is in fact slower. For me it makes up for this in flexibility, configurability, and (sometimes -- it really depends what I'm trying to do) ease of use. But if I really wanted performance, I'd either run a fresh, clean, locked-down XP, or a stripped-down Debian install, depending on what I needed.
Shouldn't that be poor website design + NoScript makes the web useless?
Our own beloved Slashdot now relies on an Ajaxy, script-dependent forum system...
I've worked with IT teachers who teach that the main components of a PC are a monitor and a hard drive "which contains all the other bits of the computer, including the CDROM".
My god I can't stand that either!!
I think it reflects a problem with the language, though. What do you call the case and everything in it? What do you call the collection of stuff including this and the monitor?
Me, I say that "case + everything in it" = "computer," and although "computer" is also used colloquially to refer to this+monitor, in fact there is no real "correct" word for this collection.
If we gave people good words for every item in the hierarchy of "stuff" maybe this confusion would go away.
Though perhaps this sort of confusion is unavoidable, and reflects the arbitrariness of the lines we draw around "units of computation." What's a core? What's a processor? What if my machine is running SETI@Home; what's the "computer" in that case? Is it the collection of all the machines running SETI@Home? Does it include the routers and switches in-between? Or, back inside the case: Does my nVidia card running CUDA count as a processor? What about my FPU? How important is it philosophically that two things are or are not located on the same chip? And what, fundamentally, are REALLY the differences between hard drive, RAM, and cache? Aren't these not fundamental concepts, but rather a hack to deal with the perhaps temporary practical matter that "storage" is either fast or cheap but not both? Maybe the problems with the language reflect an uncertainty about what computation "is" which, though perhaps not really understood or articulated by most people, is at least "in the air" in the modern world.
Wow. Just... wow.