I tend to use random passwords myself. The trick I've learned to memorizing them is to take advantage of the fact that the human brain is good at seeing patterns even when there aren't any. So I just look at the password for a bit, let myself come up with a pattern or way to describe it and memorize that. I'll often think of a password as chunks of 3 or 4 letters and just remember the junks normally associated with a thought phrase. If I can't come up with something I'll just hit regen again til I get something that my brain clicks onto.
For example I just now used a generator to create the password: zyZtgQkAJH2)rw
My thought process would be something like: Hmm there two Z's... I can use that to help me remember....Oh I can use the word zygote to remember... so the first two letters.... change things up so cap the Z and reuse the tg from zygote backs.... okay I have zyZtg memorized.... now I need to think of a quick way to get.... oh I can use Quick to remind me. AJH... that can be an acronym for "as just happens." Got a number 2) so I think "list" and twice to behind to just happens... rw that's obviously read/write... So I just have to remember "zygote Quick As Just Happens twice list read/write" ( I mentally imagine shouting the parts of the words for caps ) and I can turn it back into the password zyZtgQkAJH2)rw... then I just force me self to log in a few times while thinking that phrase and I'm all set.
I wonder how much Christmas played into those little bumps. It's almost like people head off buying expensive new phones during that period, possibly in hopes in getting them for gifts. Possibly to afford more gifts. Would have been nice to see back one more year. Because otherwise looks like JavaME is steadily losing share, but had a bump the last two months.
The QR scanner app that I use has an option to show the URL before going to it which seems like a good approach, though it's not on by default. Seems like having the a such an option be the default would be a good first step, perhaps with a straight through exception for sites already visited.
This is not to prevent trojans from coming from the App Store, it is to decrease the attack area of apps if exploits are found through them. For example suppose an app registers an URI handle, but does not properly sanitize the data before processing it leading to an arbitrary code exploit. It would still have to bypass the sandbox to further infect the system. Yes, pretty much all malware software is based on trojans. But that doesn't mean that ignoring other risks is a good thing.
The biggest problems with sandboxing is making sure that rules are tight enough but no tighter. Most of the developer complaints I've seen are either the "sandboxing is hard, I don't want to worry about enumerating what my app will do so that everything else can be blocked" or the "sandboxing is fine in principle, but without the ability to mark ( plugins / full filesystem access / ) as allowed my app will ( have reduced functionality / be unable to work )." The later issues are the ones I think that have merit. I can understand Apple being extremely tight with the original permissions because it's easier to loosen up rather than tighten, but it is going to limit what apps from the App Store can do. Hopefully they will be using some of the extra time from moving the sandbox deadline that was originally this month to March, to improve selection of the sandbox criteria to better meet the needs of some of the developers that are unable to work with the options currently provided.
The one thing I like about Apple's sandboxing over some other approaches is that it isn't noisy to the end users. People like most of us on this forum might care, but the average user sees a dialog that such an such app is requesting permissions to do . and there eyes glaze over and they either just press accept to get to the program or start panicking needless and become more susceptible to fake antivirus software claims.
Didn't expect so many questions. Was just trying to give a first hand view of the burn out risks since mostly I saw second hand reports in the comments.
But I guess... I ended up doing okay and just muddled by til it really didn't matter anymore. Turned one of my internships into a full time job against the advice of my college adviser, several professors, and my father who all thought it was beneath me and been there ever since. I still have bouts of depression, especially the "why didn't I continue... I was on top and I let it all just slip away" type, but fortunately the panic attacks are mostly a thing of the past. And I don't worry about worrying about the impossibility of reality anymore. Seriously that used to be like my biggest dread, that I would logically provide that even nothing itself doesn't exists and go insane in the process. Seems kinda funny to me now. I'm not much like the person I used to appear to be anymore.
He's posting on Slashdot, so I'd go with "No."
Hmm guess Daphne is a boy's name these days? But yes I posted something on slashdot so something must not be right with me? Is this one of those trick logic questions like "this statement is false?" You realize you can solve those these days with fuzzy logic. But fortunately I get a pass since you got the gender wrong.:P
Probably around 19. Some of it I felt younger... earlier to mid 20s I started even thinking that nothing had any true meaning and that even reality itself was without foundation. I spent a lot of sleepless nights back then trying not to think about the meaningless nothing that I began to perceive reality to be a figment of.
Sounds like he's much further along than I was, doing calculus at 8? That's quite impressive. I didn't start getting serious about calculus until about 12.
College is indeed a good option, and from the linked article sounds like he already doing that. It's what I did when I was a kid, took a mixture of college classes, ( first one was around 5th grade ), did some internships, some R&D contract work, all while going to elementary, middle and high school. There is nothing like being ending up being a TA for a course and having one of your current teachers be a student for it while still also having them be your teacher. My last year of high school was only classes like gym, and at the time I hated going. Looking back though I'm glad I did.
The one scary thing with this, as others mentioned in their comments, is burn out is a big risk. I know I ended up hating anytime anyone would say something like "Wow. Someday you will do....". I burned out in grad school. Part of it was probably that I never really had to work at being smart before, "why study -- skimming it once is enough", part of it was that I saw everything else as just trivial details and useless facts in the way of the big pictures, and part of it was the misshapen world view combined with an extra large serving of ego that I had developed.
Looks like an interesting program. I might have to check it out. That said I've never really been good with flash cards myself. I tend to remember stuff more by associating it with the location I learned it.
When memorizing phone numbers and the like, I type them in so that Anki can check my answer. Then when I get to the phone I find that my muscle-memory is not only useless, it is actually a hindrance.
Have you considered installing a keyboard layout which reverses the number pad that you can type with the "correct" layout?
When you need to remember a phone number, do you not mentally punch it into an imaginary phone?
I can see how some would remember that way. I don't for most things, with the exception of some C64 basic keywords that I think of in Qwerty ( even though I program mostly in Dvorak these days ) and passwords as a web of lines for when I type them disjoint from the memory of what the password actually is. I tend to recall numbers ( and words ) as a whole and then just think the number as my fingers worry about about what key they have to type without really being aware of the keys or individual numbers involved. Alas I tend to give the various component numbers out of order if I'm try to recall them as digits. For example 123-456-7890. If not careful I would give the speak the digits as 7 - 89 - 0h - 4 - 56 - 1 - 23, even though I would dial or type them correctly. I'm pretty consistent in this type of mistake, which has some funny results when I'm doing team programming.
"This number should be 7 89 04 56 1 23 here." Types 123-456-7890. Other person "Don't you mean: 1 23 4 56 78 90". Me: "That's what I... I did it again didn't I?"
Have you considered holding you hands slightly different between the keypads? For example I touch type 7-8-9 number pads like it was a normal keyboard with the hand normal hovering over the home row centered on the five. Where as with 1-2-3 keypads I normally type those using my thumbs. This allows me to have two different special memory patterns that I can switch between and use without thinking about it. I actually do something similar with Dvorak vs Qwerty keyboards. Depending on how I hold my hands near the keyboard a different set of spacial memory is triggered. I still occasionally while type using the wrong style but then notice that I was holding my hands wrong and instantly switch without having to really think about the differences between the layouts. I use a more normal home position for Dvorak and angle my hands slightly more for qwerty. Urp.qamln. cu C abin. mf dabeo gl nct. ydco C yfl. ',.pyf and now with my hands back to the other position I switch back to Dvorak. ( I had to tweak the previous since auto-correct messed up angle to "a bin." instead of "abin.". I was surprised it didn't change more of it. )
I got introduced to computers december '79 on the old commodore pets. Since most stuff was in basic back then I started messing around with existing programs, and quickly learned how do stuff like edit the number of lives in the pac-man and asteroid clones we had for the machine. I messed with other programs and typed in programs from the computer magazines of the day, and eventually wrote my first complete program at 9 (an learning tic-tac-toe program), which I ended up showing off at a computer show. Found out about copyrights at the same fair when I got in trouble for printing out the source-code for someones robotron-style game because I wanted to see how it worked. After basic I learned 6502/Z80 and Pascal (nothing quite like going from 3rd grade to a college class studying pascal on teletypes and old dec terminals), and eventually played with Logo, C, Fortran, C++, Occam etc.. through out the rest of my primary school years.
Anyways my suggestion is start with existing open source programs (games or amusement type software would be great) and let your brother mess around with them for a bit. As much as C / C++ are powerful and useful an interpretative language were the results of any changes made can be seen quickly is good. Old school emulators with some basic programs, or stuff written in javascript may be good starts, or better yet if they play games that support scripted addons let them play with some of those. For example addons for World of Warcraft are written in LUA.
Getting used to programming is more important than which language, once one language is learned jumping to a new language is only a little more work, especially for similar languages. The biggest differences when switching languages are language type (procedural, object oriented, or data-flow), type strictness (loose/strict typing), memory management (garbage collected, manual or mixed), structure (structured or spagetti), parsing (compiled, or interpretive). While it's better to learn stuff like memory management, structural and object oriented programming early, it can still be learned after getting a feel for programming. At least that was true for me, my earliest programs were horrible spagetti with mixtures of basic and assembly.
I'd wait on stuff like design patterns and other meta concepts of programming, they make a lot more sense after someone has learned to program and wants to hone their craft.
That test will normally work for compilers such as the gcc which actually does something similar during it's normal bootstrap and comparing the stage 2 and stage 3 compilers. Some environments will still insert randomness like build times and the like into the compile, see the -frandom-seed option for example as a way to combat this. libstdc++ is often not compared from what I understand because of this. Unfortunately the compilers I work with don't have a random seed option, and I have to resort using LD_PRELOAD and intercepting some standard library calls so that the random seeds and other meta data that gets into the object files are identical so that I can spot validate object files.
Comparing the output between two different compilers, or even the same compiler with different debugging or optimization options is not at all trivial, especially when talking about compiling larger programs. Even a small difference in register optimizations can make a relatively large difference in the output. My day job involves writing tools that do object file comparisions and it's a lot tricker than it sounds. Sure if you have what should be two identical compilers, compiling code with identical options and in the identical order, and using the same file paths for the source code, no memory limited optimizations are used etc., the binaries files produced will mostly be the same. Even then compiler tempories for statics can be different which can ripple in some cases into visible changes. And yes I've run into that case a few times, mostly as related to being used in vtables. There are lots of pseudo random places within most executable file formats for a compiler to hide extra code.
I assume you realize that using echo $RANDOM$RANDOM, results in a higher chance that the first and fifth character of your password are a 1 or 2, even 3 has a slightly higher chance than the other digits.
In my opinion deep menus and to some extent tool-bars need to be replaced or supplemented with some kind of "command search", almost Google-like.
OS X has something like this in the help menu, search option. You can type a part of a command name and it shows a drop down of matching commands in addition to searching the help document for the program and when you mouse over them also shows where they are located in the original menu. To be honest I don't use it all that often, since not being able to find the right menu in an application is often the sign that I don't want to use it. The other problem is that several programs think that a custom help engine is better than using the default help system which ends up meaning search only searches commands, which makes it only half as useful.
Wow! Looks like HP has gotten more efficient in their shipping.
About ten years ago I get back from lunch to find a huge box at my desk. Typical workstation plus monitor size box from HP with a shipping label was like 4ft+ cube. Was not exactly sure what it was so got to openning it. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box also with a shipping label listing one HP address to another HP address. This went on for quite a while til I got to a small box with padding. (If I recall the stuff have been shipped a total of 5 times adding several boxes each time) Inside that box was a large manila envelope. Inside manila envelope was a white envelope (or might have been the other way around) it has been a while. Inside that was a single 5" by 6" sheet of paper with a single license for the HP-UX 9 C++ compiler.
I had order 5 licenses... the next day another of the licenses came, though at least the outer box was not quite as large. I often wondered if it was either that there shipping system was set up for just sending license keys or if they really wanted to make sure that piece of paper didn't get lost in the mail.
The other odd thing was the licenses didn't include any serial numbers or what not, just the B code number for the software and a statement about it being 1 license.
And how is the antivirus going to catch the problem when it first appears? When large scale OS-X viruses start appearing the existing AV software won't recognize them or know how to handle them. The software needs to have either a signature of known viruses or a heuristic that catches likely viruses. Without a large pool of OS X viruses it would be next to impossible for any AV software to protect against future threats. AV software is reactive security, not proactive. The only thing an AV program before then will do is protect against some older Mac OS virus and help avoid passing windows virus, that and decrease performance and increase energy usage. As the article says the best thing to do is be smart about how you use the computer and keep abreast of any changes. Because of their limited numbers any notable Mac viruses will get reported soon after they are found, at which point it may be worthwhile reconsidering the use of AV software. Just because there is not such thing as a secure computer doesn't mean that best way to balance the risks / cost ratio for all systems is the same.
I've pretty much come to not worry about the useful life of a printer. You can often get new printers with around 50% full ink/toner cartridges for about the same price (or even less) then the cost of a new non-thirdparty cartridge. I've also found that I print so few stuff that ink-jet cartridges tend to dry out long before use up all their ink. So as much as I hate what I'm doing (considering the waste) I just buy a new printer anytime I need more ink (which works out to about a printer ever 18~24 months). For example my last laser printer cost me about $60 and had a toner cartridge that was half the size of a new one for my previous laser printer which would have cost me $99 at the time. Meanwhile the printer had twice the resolution. I did about the same the last time I needed a color inkjet.
Some programs can even end up running slower depending on stuff like CPU affinity (which basically amounts to cache misses) and additional locking overhead and needing to add memory barriers. Tricks that work with a single core under multithreading don't always carry over well to multiple cores.
I agree with the parent on vague candidates. When I do my research before voting (and it doesn't really take all that long, it's easy to find several different sites and points of view on most of the candidates and issues), any one that is vague or wishy-washy automatically loses my vote. I do not mind a candidate that is able to change their minds on issues given justifications, but I do not want one that will hide from the difficult questions.
Mostly I chose to vote for the least objectionable candidate. If I find myself tied I tend to pick either the incumbent (especially for judicial positions, or district attorney type positions) or pseudo-randomly with a slight bias away from what I would assume the normal bias would be. ((IE 2nd or 3rd choice on ballot, or opposite party of the current majority.)) I'm a strong believer that no party should ever have a strong majority, and that forcing compromises are the best way to deal with any flaws in our political system. In general I find politicians of any stripe with a "mandate" to be a bit scary.
Multiply packaged pieces of paper separately sent.
on
Excessive Tech Packaging?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd ordered several software licensees for a Unix C++ compiler. Eventually a large box showed up at my cube. It was a full size computer/monitor box. Probably about 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box that had a shipping label that showed that it had been shipped to from another facility to the facility that had shipped the larger box. Inside this box was yet another shipping box also with a label, inside that was a large legal size manila envelope with a mailing label. Inside of that was a white envelope (no mailing label this time). And finally inside of that was a single 4" by 5" sheet of paper containing one of the software license. I found it amazing that that sheet of paper made traveled through so many shipping facilities, each time getting another layer of boxes before finally arriving.
The next license arrived similarly packed (only the large computer size box wasn't used for it.) My only guesses are either they wanted to impress upon us how valuable/expensive the license was, or that they had some sort of standardized shipping process that assumed everything was workstations.
I had a very similar experience with the music store, though I only lost a few songs. Apple was able to get them all back for me. I was rather impressed by how nice they were about the whole thing, and it's one of the reason I still buy a lot of music from them. I do wish though they would start selling music in Apple Lossless (protected or not, I don't care, since Apple's DRM seem liberal enough), and even better offer the ability to upgrade songs to that format. I'd be willing to pay a small fee per song just to upgrade.
The scary thing with this is I can easily imagine how the warden could be used to grief players.
Step 1 create a website that creates a hidden pop under with a magic window title. Perhaps a second hidden window that loads a verboten URL. Step 2 put something of interest to WoW players on the site. Step 3 advertise the site to the targets (disable step 1 for a short period around step 3 depending on how you announce it.) Step 4 laugh as the lag time starts to get better on favorite server. Step 5 watch the flood of complaints on the WoW forums begin to trick in giggling. Step 6 feel a nagging concern as people start to think about the problem. Step 7 Begin to panic as someone finds your website and post the whois information. Step 8.... maybe this needs more thought. Berate yourself that this should have been step 0.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to use random passwords myself. The trick I've learned to memorizing them is to take advantage of the fact that the human brain is good at seeing patterns even when there aren't any. So I just look at the password for a bit, let myself come up with a pattern or way to describe it and memorize that. I'll often think of a password as chunks of 3 or 4 letters and just remember the junks normally associated with a thought phrase. If I can't come up with something I'll just hit regen again til I get something that my brain clicks onto.
For example I just now used a generator to create the password: zyZtgQkAJH2)rw
My thought process would be something like: .... oh I can use Quick to remind me. AJH... that can be an acronym for "as just happens." Got a number 2) so I think "list" and twice to behind to just happens... rw that's obviously read/write... So I just have to remember "zygote Quick As Just Happens twice list read/write" ( I mentally imagine shouting the parts of the words for caps ) and I can turn it back into the password zyZtgQkAJH2)rw...
Hmm there two Z's... I can use that to help me remember....Oh I can use the word zygote to remember... so the first two letters.... change things up so cap the Z and reuse the tg from zygote backs.... okay I have zyZtg memorized.... now I need to think of a quick way to get
then I just force me self to log in a few times while thinking that phrase and I'm all set.
I wonder how much Christmas played into those little bumps. It's almost like people head off buying expensive new phones during that period, possibly in hopes in getting them for gifts. Possibly to afford more gifts. Would have been nice to see back one more year. Because otherwise looks like JavaME is steadily losing share, but had a bump the last two months.
The QR scanner app that I use has an option to show the URL before going to it which seems like a good approach, though it's not on by default. Seems like having the a such an option be the default would be a good first step, perhaps with a straight through exception for sites already visited.
This is not to prevent trojans from coming from the App Store, it is to decrease the attack area of apps if exploits are found through them. For example suppose an app registers an URI handle, but does not properly sanitize the data before processing it leading to an arbitrary code exploit. It would still have to bypass the sandbox to further infect the system. Yes, pretty much all malware software is based on trojans. But that doesn't mean that ignoring other risks is a good thing.
The biggest problems with sandboxing is making sure that rules are tight enough but no tighter. Most of the developer complaints I've seen are either the "sandboxing is hard, I don't want to worry about enumerating what my app will do so that everything else can be blocked" or the "sandboxing is fine in principle, but without the ability to mark ( plugins / full filesystem access / ) as allowed my app will ( have reduced functionality / be unable to work )." The later issues are the ones I think that have merit. I can understand Apple being extremely tight with the original permissions because it's easier to loosen up rather than tighten, but it is going to limit what apps from the App Store can do. Hopefully they will be using some of the extra time from moving the sandbox deadline that was originally this month to March, to improve selection of the sandbox criteria to better meet the needs of some of the developers that are unable to work with the options currently provided.
The one thing I like about Apple's sandboxing over some other approaches is that it isn't noisy to the end users. People like most of us on this forum might care, but the average user sees a dialog that such an such app is requesting permissions to do . and there eyes glaze over and they either just press accept to get to the program or start panicking needless and become more susceptible to fake antivirus software claims.
Did you pop out of it?
Didn't expect so many questions. Was just trying to give a first hand view of the burn out risks since mostly I saw second hand reports in the comments.
But I guess... I ended up doing okay and just muddled by til it really didn't matter anymore. Turned one of my internships into a full time job against the advice of my college adviser, several professors, and my father who all thought it was beneath me and been there ever since. I still have bouts of depression, especially the "why didn't I continue... I was on top and I let it all just slip away" type, but fortunately the panic attacks are mostly a thing of the past. And I don't worry about worrying about the impossibility of reality anymore. Seriously that used to be like my biggest dread, that I would logically provide that even nothing itself doesn't exists and go insane in the process. Seems kinda funny to me now. I'm not much like the person I used to appear to be anymore.
He's posting on Slashdot, so I'd go with "No."
Hmm guess Daphne is a boy's name these days? But yes I posted something on slashdot so something must not be right with me? Is this one of those trick logic questions like "this statement is false?" You realize you can solve those these days with fuzzy logic. But fortunately I get a pass since you got the gender wrong. :P
Probably around 19. Some of it I felt younger... earlier to mid 20s I started even thinking that nothing had any true meaning and that even reality itself was without foundation. I spent a lot of sleepless nights back then trying not to think about the meaningless nothing that I began to perceive reality to be a figment of.
Sounds like he's much further along than I was, doing calculus at 8? That's quite impressive. I didn't start getting serious about calculus until about 12.
College is indeed a good option, and from the linked article sounds like he already doing that. It's what I did when I was a kid, took a mixture of college classes, ( first one was around 5th grade ), did some internships, some R&D contract work, all while going to elementary, middle and high school. There is nothing like being ending up being a TA for a course and having one of your current teachers be a student for it while still also having them be your teacher. My last year of high school was only classes like gym, and at the time I hated going. Looking back though I'm glad I did.
The one scary thing with this, as others mentioned in their comments, is burn out is a big risk. I know I ended up hating anytime anyone would say something like "Wow. Someday you will do ....". I burned out in grad school. Part of it was probably that I never really had to work at being smart before, "why study -- skimming it once is enough", part of it was that I saw everything else as just trivial details and useless facts in the way of the big pictures, and part of it was the misshapen world view combined with an extra large serving of ego that I had developed.
What about using one of the key remapping applications for the HP 48 series of calculators? See the stuff at http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/utils/interface/ for example.
I use Anki to learn and memorize facts.
Looks like an interesting program. I might have to check it out. That said I've never really been good with flash cards myself. I tend to remember stuff more by associating it with the location I learned it.
When memorizing phone numbers and the like, I type them in so that Anki can check my answer. Then when I get to the phone I find that my muscle-memory is not only useless, it is actually a hindrance.
Have you considered installing a keyboard layout which reverses the number pad that you can type with the "correct" layout?
When you need to remember a phone number, do you not mentally punch it into an imaginary phone?
I can see how some would remember that way. I don't for most things, with the exception of some C64 basic keywords that I think of in Qwerty ( even though I program mostly in Dvorak these days ) and passwords as a web of lines for when I type them disjoint from the memory of what the password actually is. I tend to recall numbers ( and words ) as a whole and then just think the number as my fingers worry about about what key they have to type without really being aware of the keys or individual numbers involved. Alas I tend to give the various component numbers out of order if I'm try to recall them as digits. For example 123-456-7890. If not careful I would give the speak the digits as 7 - 89 - 0h - 4 - 56 - 1 - 23, even though I would dial or type them correctly. I'm pretty consistent in this type of mistake, which has some funny results when I'm doing team programming.
"This number should be 7 89 04 56 1 23 here." Types 123-456-7890. Other person "Don't you mean: 1 23 4 56 78 90". Me: "That's what I... I did it again didn't I?"
Have you considered holding you hands slightly different between the keypads? For example I touch type 7-8-9 number pads like it was a normal keyboard with the hand normal hovering over the home row centered on the five. Where as with 1-2-3 keypads I normally type those using my thumbs. This allows me to have two different special memory patterns that I can switch between and use without thinking about it. I actually do something similar with Dvorak vs Qwerty keyboards. Depending on how I hold my hands near the keyboard a different set of spacial memory is triggered. I still occasionally while type using the wrong style but then notice that I was holding my hands wrong and instantly switch without having to really think about the differences between the layouts. I use a more normal home position for Dvorak and angle my hands slightly more for qwerty. Urp .qamln. cu C abin. mf dabeo gl nct. ydco C yfl. ',.pyf and now with my hands back to the other position I switch back to Dvorak. ( I had to tweak the previous since auto-correct messed up angle to "a bin." instead of "abin.". I was surprised it didn't change more of it. )
I got introduced to computers december '79 on the old commodore pets. Since most stuff was in basic back then I started messing around with existing programs, and quickly learned how do stuff like edit the number of lives in the pac-man and asteroid clones we had for the machine. I messed with other programs and typed in programs from the computer magazines of the day, and eventually wrote my first complete program at 9 (an learning tic-tac-toe program), which I ended up showing off at a computer show. Found out about copyrights at the same fair when I got in trouble for printing out the source-code for someones robotron-style game because I wanted to see how it worked. After basic I learned 6502/Z80 and Pascal (nothing quite like going from 3rd grade to a college class studying pascal on teletypes and old dec terminals), and eventually played with Logo, C, Fortran, C++, Occam etc.. through out the rest of my primary school years.
Anyways my suggestion is start with existing open source programs (games or amusement type software would be great) and let your brother mess around with them for a bit. As much as C / C++ are powerful and useful an interpretative language were the results of any changes made can be seen quickly is good. Old school emulators with some basic programs, or stuff written in javascript may be good starts, or better yet if they play games that support scripted addons let them play with some of those. For example addons for World of Warcraft are written in LUA.
Getting used to programming is more important than which language, once one language is learned jumping to a new language is only a little more work, especially for similar languages. The biggest differences when switching languages are language type (procedural, object oriented, or data-flow), type strictness (loose/strict typing), memory management (garbage collected, manual or mixed), structure (structured or spagetti), parsing (compiled, or interpretive). While it's better to learn stuff like memory management, structural and object oriented programming early, it can still be learned after getting a feel for programming. At least that was true for me, my earliest programs were horrible spagetti with mixtures of basic and assembly.
I'd wait on stuff like design patterns and other meta concepts of programming, they make a lot more sense after someone has learned to program and wants to hone their craft.
That test will normally work for compilers such as the gcc which actually does something similar during it's normal bootstrap and comparing the stage 2 and stage 3 compilers. Some environments will still insert randomness like build times and the like into the compile, see the -frandom-seed option for example as a way to combat this. libstdc++ is often not compared from what I understand because of this. Unfortunately the compilers I work with don't have a random seed option, and I have to resort using LD_PRELOAD and intercepting some standard library calls so that the random seeds and other meta data that gets into the object files are identical so that I can spot validate object files.
Comparing the output between two different compilers, or even the same compiler with different debugging or optimization options is not at all trivial, especially when talking about compiling larger programs. Even a small difference in register optimizations can make a relatively large difference in the output. My day job involves writing tools that do object file comparisions and it's a lot tricker than it sounds. Sure if you have what should be two identical compilers, compiling code with identical options and in the identical order, and using the same file paths for the source code, no memory limited optimizations are used etc., the binaries files produced will mostly be the same. Even then compiler tempories for statics can be different which can ripple in some cases into visible changes. And yes I've run into that case a few times, mostly as related to being used in vtables. There are lots of pseudo random places within most executable file formats for a compiler to hide extra code.
I assume you realize that using echo $RANDOM$RANDOM, results in a higher chance that the first and fifth character of your password are a 1 or 2, even 3 has a slightly higher chance than the other digits.
There is always the iRex 1000 or iRex iLiad if you want a larger screen.
In my opinion deep menus and to some extent tool-bars need to be replaced or supplemented with some kind of "command search", almost Google-like.
OS X has something like this in the help menu, search option. You can type a part of a command name and it shows a drop down of matching commands in addition to searching the help document for the program and when you mouse over them also shows where they are located in the original menu. To be honest I don't use it all that often, since not being able to find the right menu in an application is often the sign that I don't want to use it. The other problem is that several programs think that a custom help engine is better than using the default help system which ends up meaning search only searches commands, which makes it only half as useful.
Wow! Looks like HP has gotten more efficient in their shipping.
About ten years ago I get back from lunch to find a huge box at my desk. Typical workstation plus monitor size box from HP with a shipping label was like 4ft+ cube. Was not exactly sure what it was so got to openning it. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box also with a shipping label listing one HP address to another HP address. This went on for quite a while til I got to a small box with padding. (If I recall the stuff have been shipped a total of 5 times adding several boxes each time) Inside that box was a large manila envelope. Inside manila envelope was a white envelope (or might have been the other way around) it has been a while. Inside that was a single 5" by 6" sheet of paper with a single license for the HP-UX 9 C++ compiler.
I had order 5 licenses... the next day another of the licenses came, though at least the outer box was not quite as large. I often wondered if it was either that there shipping system was set up for just sending license keys or if they really wanted to make sure that piece of paper didn't get lost in the mail.
The other odd thing was the licenses didn't include any serial numbers or what not, just the B code number for the software and a statement about it being 1 license.
And how is the antivirus going to catch the problem when it first appears? When large scale OS-X viruses start appearing the existing AV software won't recognize them or know how to handle them. The software needs to have either a signature of known viruses or a heuristic that catches likely viruses. Without a large pool of OS X viruses it would be next to impossible for any AV software to protect against future threats. AV software is reactive security, not proactive. The only thing an AV program before then will do is protect against some older Mac OS virus and help avoid passing windows virus, that and decrease performance and increase energy usage. As the article says the best thing to do is be smart about how you use the computer and keep abreast of any changes. Because of their limited numbers any notable Mac viruses will get reported soon after they are found, at which point it may be worthwhile reconsidering the use of AV software. Just because there is not such thing as a secure computer doesn't mean that best way to balance the risks / cost ratio for all systems is the same.
I've pretty much come to not worry about the useful life of a printer. You can often get new printers with around 50% full ink/toner cartridges for about the same price (or even less) then the cost of a new non-thirdparty cartridge. I've also found that I print so few stuff that ink-jet cartridges tend to dry out long before use up all their ink. So as much as I hate what I'm doing (considering the waste) I just buy a new printer anytime I need more ink (which works out to about a printer ever 18~24 months). For example my last laser printer cost me about $60 and had a toner cartridge that was half the size of a new one for my previous laser printer which would have cost me $99 at the time. Meanwhile the printer had twice the resolution. I did about the same the last time I needed a color inkjet.
Some programs can even end up running slower depending on stuff like CPU affinity (which basically amounts to cache misses) and additional locking overhead and needing to add memory barriers. Tricks that work with a single core under multithreading don't always carry over well to multiple cores.
I agree with the parent on vague candidates. When I do my research before voting (and it doesn't really take all that long, it's easy to find several different sites and points of view on most of the candidates and issues), any one that is vague or wishy-washy automatically loses my vote. I do not mind a candidate that is able to change their minds on issues given justifications, but I do not want one that will hide from the difficult questions.
Mostly I chose to vote for the least objectionable candidate. If I find myself tied I tend to pick either the incumbent (especially for judicial positions, or district attorney type positions) or pseudo-randomly with a slight bias away from what I would assume the normal bias would be. ((IE 2nd or 3rd choice on ballot, or opposite party of the current majority.)) I'm a strong believer that no party should ever have a strong majority, and that forcing compromises are the best way to deal with any flaws in our political system. In general I find politicians of any stripe with a "mandate" to be a bit scary.
Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Japanese-English Dictionary Server offers Japanese verb conjugation support. This sites been around for a while: main page from 1999. I found mentions of conjugation support back as far as 2003-02-11.
I'd ordered several software licensees for a Unix C++ compiler. Eventually a large box showed up at my cube. It was a full size computer/monitor box. Probably about 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box that had a shipping label that showed that it had been shipped to from another facility to the facility that had shipped the larger box. Inside this box was yet another shipping box also with a label, inside that was a large legal size manila envelope with a mailing label. Inside of that was a white envelope (no mailing label this time). And finally inside of that was a single 4" by 5" sheet of paper containing one of the software license. I found it amazing that that sheet of paper made traveled through so many shipping facilities, each time getting another layer of boxes before finally arriving.
The next license arrived similarly packed (only the large computer size box wasn't used for it.) My only guesses are either they wanted to impress upon us how valuable/expensive the license was, or that they had some sort of standardized shipping process that assumed everything was workstations.
I had a very similar experience with the music store, though I only lost a few songs. Apple was able to get them all back for me. I was rather impressed by how nice they were about the whole thing, and it's one of the reason I still buy a lot of music from them. I do wish though they would start selling music in Apple Lossless (protected or not, I don't care, since Apple's DRM seem liberal enough), and even better offer the ability to upgrade songs to that format. I'd be willing to pay a small fee per song just to upgrade.
The scary thing with this is I can easily imagine how the warden could be used to grief players.
.... maybe this needs more thought. Berate yourself that this should have been step 0.
Step 1 create a website that creates a hidden pop under with a magic window title. Perhaps a second hidden window that loads a verboten URL.
Step 2 put something of interest to WoW players on the site.
Step 3 advertise the site to the targets (disable step 1 for a short period around step 3 depending on how you announce it.)
Step 4 laugh as the lag time starts to get better on favorite server.
Step 5 watch the flood of complaints on the WoW forums begin to trick in giggling.
Step 6 feel a nagging concern as people start to think about the problem.
Step 7 Begin to panic as someone finds your website and post the whois information.
Step 8