Now that there is decent VM software for both Windows and Linux, I will never set up a dual-boot system again. That is the very worst way to get two OSes, particularly competing OSes, on one box. There goes any "need" for a third-party partition program to support two OSes, or competition over a boot sector.
Every time something that is distributed in binary is rebuilt from source for local use, by definition it's to change some assumption that was inherent in the testing of the original binary (or else the binary distribution would suffice). And with that, some non-0 confidence that was built into the binary release by that testing is wiped out and must be recovered by local analysis and testing (i.e., time and effort) or reduced expectations. Otherwise, it's running on blind faith. This is particularly true with programs that are used frequently, i.e., one expects to depend on them repeatedly. So in my mind, "the best of both worlds" is more meaningful if it refers to fast and reliable apps. I don't care how fast the compiler is if I can't trust the results anymore. That is a different economy equation, and completely justifes the "convenience" of pre-compiled binaries in many applications.
A fair bust. I remembered the number from my admittedly old Halliday and Resnick, 6.02252e23. Even wikipedia's quote of an authoritative source for 1998 has been updated a little as of 2002.
I was thinking about stuffing the entries through heavy automation, not simply using computers to make entries versus not using them. And I don't think there was anything wrong with the earlier automated entries either, but the merchant felt compelled to add prizes for public relations purposes nevertheless.
There were also cases of stores caught throwing away hand-written entries while attempting to throw away automated entries that worsened the already bad public relations. Imagine the pummeling Apple could get, and the associated problems ordinary people will have trying to use the site (maybe even including lost transactions and lost money) during this giant DDoS "attack".
I think that battling against each patent one-by-one is going to be a never-ending losing battle
The primary purpose of the EFF's exercise is to publicize this view; in other words, that's the point. It gets people to discuss the issue, write congress, donate, strengthen backbones, etc. It's secondary, though still useful, to actually knock off these particular patents along the way. There is also a lot less personal or even corporate risk doing it this way than violating the patents and hoping they get revoked later.
... there ought to be a way that our CARS can tell how much gas has been put into them
That would require an expensive change (sufficiently accurate flow or volume measure) to all cars and, worse, all existing cars to get any quick effect. An alternate way might be to do something along the lines of what was done to banks (that used to shave fractions of a cent from interest payments by always rounding down): require the total amount of gas pumped from the storage tank (say, at next refill time) to agree with the sum of the amounts claimed to be dispensed by the pumps. There are many fewer filling stations and pumps to deal with than cars. Another advantage is that rather than looking like a pittance at a few cents per car fill-up, it would be reported as a much larger amount corresponding to all cars filled from that storage tank's worth. There are still a bunch of logistics problems and places to crack it, but the effort still seems much less.
Not necessarily good enough. In the article's KCBS link, the DWM agent used a 5 gallon measure. That was enough to catch 4 of the 5 stations he and the reporter visited. Given the situation, it's apparently not necessary to be any more clever than this.
And why stop at a fixed playlist? This has so many {exciting,absurd} possibilities. 1) Offer menu choices. 2) If you've got caller ID, remember the setting for that customer's next call. 3) Think of things that would work well on an open speakerphone that the caller's probably using in a cube.
As for selections, sure, you could go with generic popular music, but, particularly if there are selectable options, I'd try for more things at the absurd/fun/useful end of the scale, like:
Raymond Scott, say, Powerhouse.
Teletypes, like an old newsroom.
A scripted, busy call center with crazy discussions going on. You and a few cohorts could do this yourselves, avoiding licensing issues, and making it a tongue-in-cheek version of your company's business. Your company would have to have the right culture for this.
A news feed.
The Jeopardy final question theme, if your call answering statistics are good enough.
Sound effects: waves crashing, coffee percolating, someone typing very rapidly (so the caller sounds busy to people in the neighboring cubes), cars racing.
Tips of the day for your product or service.
That all said, nothing is more annoying, once there is interesting hold conent, than to have it interrupted every 15 seconds reminding the caller that "Your call is important to us, stay on the line to keep your position, blah, blah.". Say that at most once up-front and never again.
Well, the articles mentions that some email providers are blocking GMail due to privacy concerns. Seems like a bunch of hogwash to me.
Sure does. If my ISP is trying to protect me from what it views as generic privacy problems at gmail, what about all of my other recipients (and the closure of those they correspond with) when 1) they are hit with a virus that spews my address or other info everywhere; 2) too-wide discovery in a court that unnecessarily exposes my information (read: start with the entire hard disk); 3) some person in the closure set simply being a jerk? Or worse, my own ISP selling access to me. My ISP is doing precious little about those, they are much more realistic threats, and my ISP has virtually no control (or standing) over some of them. At least I can read gmail's privacy policy, know that it will get discussed in communities like this one, and have some expectation that they will enforce it, unlike smaller ISPs and distant recipients-of-recipients. So why even consider targeting gmail for such a reason?
From the referenced page: The amount of work and planning to do such a thorough charting of the syntax must have been large.
Actually, my old copy of Wilson and Addyman's "A Practical Introduction to Pascal" has (a standard version of) this chart in Appendix I. Mine's the second edition, but the first edition was published in 1978. I know I've seen earlier versions as well.
One of the distinct advantages of Pascal was that its syntax was so straightforward that creating a "railroad normal form" chart like this was relatively simple. You could easily write a parser for the language from scratch as a term project, without parsing tools like lex/yacc.
Though the listed viruses may be new, the actual update was released over a month ago and those of us here should already know better. This is the kind of "timely" information I get from Comcast support.
Sounds just like I've been discovered by the Vogons^H^H^H^H^H^Hspammers, and am suffering the consequences.
Re:Developers, Developers, Developers
on
Mono Beta 2 Released
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Microsoft can't break these applications.
Are you serious, or in denial? There are precious few interfaces in this business that are so carefully and completely defined that they never change, or that are so absolutely backward compatible over time. (The ones that are, are a wonder to behold). For history, look at DOS to Win16 to Win32, or HTML support in IE, all claiming some measure of backward compatibility but with gaping holes. Look at the list of software that breaks when a major OS release comes out, or a service pack, or even a security update. Can you be absolutely certain that you're not depending on any undocumented or risky behavior (that may change later), or some interface that will be found to be a big security problem and have to be closed or changed, or a company with a long record of backward incompatibility (and there are many more than just Microsoft)? The better companies supply notice, tools and support to help deal with the changes, but changes there are, and you have to deal with them.
You can argue whether the primary reasons are conspiracies, innovation, or just thinking more clearly today than yesterday. But the result is the same. I wouldn't hold my breath.
The most bizarre board game I've ever received is called The Tomato Game, (c) Susan A. Tambone. There isn't any other company name or publisher anywhere on it. It's a standard game with a path, tokens, die, and question/action cards that you draw when you land on different spaces. It comes in a box designed to look like a cardboard tomato crate. I grow veggies at home and my wife got this game for me several years ago after finding it advertised in the back of some magazine.
It has the feel of a game written by an instructor at an ag college for people in the tomato industry. Here's a sample question:
According to the U.S. standard for grades of fresh tomatoes not more than what % of the surface on a "turning" tomato may be pink or red?
Answer: 30%
No wonder store-bought tomatoes are never ripe.
Or this trick question:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is responsible for ensuring the safety of
A. Meat
B. Poultry
C. Eggs
D. Fruits & vegetables
E: All of the above
Answer: A, B & C
I bet you too thought that the existence of choice E ruled out a combo answer!
Of course, the fun is all of the silliness as people try to guess obscure tomato diseases and "best" practices (by the industry's standards) when noone has a chance. A very surreal experience. Best played in conjunction with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
The average WiFi user was tech savvy too, back when only us computer geeks used it.
Here's a counter-example. Two years ago, the San Jose Mercury published this article by one of the regular tech reviewers. He was unable to get his WiFi setup to work until a tech came over and turned off his firewall. Problem solved; finesse with a sledge hammer. His system's probably a slag heap by now with all of the extra use it's gotten.
I've had a chance to teach (or help teach) several well-past-college adults to program. HTML and its associated friends are a good start, probably because of the immediate feedback and ability to do something fairly useful right away. For example, perhaps she'd like to make a Web site of her own. But if she's really serious, I'd move to some more formal language before returing to the advanced uses of any scripting language. I think I'd pick a language that was designed for teaching, such as Logo or Pascal (despite its age).
The biggest advantage that you have is that it'll be one-on-one and you can adjust to her interest and patience. I don't think I can overstate this, especially with the shower of languages that people have listed here. For example, if your mom majored in math but never programmed, you could go right to something like lisp. If not, then maybe something more statement oriented.
But for teaching serious programming, I'd say that the first two really big road blocks that I've seen for non-technical people learning to program are the difference between a number and a string (and ultimately quoting generally), and indexing (array indexing in HLLs, or registers used as such in assembly language). After that, I'd say it's recursion, particularly for someone with little background in math (has never gotten proof by mathematical induction).
While I might use a scripting language to get over the initial idea of having the computer do something you tell it (and that might be immediately useful), I wouldn't stay with one very long in the beginning. Most have tortuous syntax, particularly with quoting and arrays.
About the road blocks I mentioned:
Number versus string: It seems to be very difficult to get across the idea that these are very different statements (though the differences become more apparent with more complicated expressions and string versus numeric variable types):
print 12345; print "12345";
My mother took an introductory programming course and this area was a big problem.
Indexing: I think the major issue is the indirection involved, and having to keep track of two things at once (the index and the target). This one hit two adults I've taught.
today... beta version= decreased liability (because of the bugs) while still collecting profits/'name-building'/etc
Exactly, on the sentiment, but this is hardly new, and hardly just software. I've seen plenty of microprocessor manuals printed with "PRELIMINARY INFORMATION" long after the procesors were shipping and built into production systems. In the few cases I was able to get an authoritative reason, it was closely related to CYA (such as not wanting to be legally held to the specification if a sufficiently nasty bug in was discovered after shipment). And when this wasn't enough, some then added the "Do not use in life-support applications" disclaimers.
If those users, not to mention the company itself, are in California, then California certainly gets to have a say. Just as the state just did with the recent PUC decision on cell phones. The Feds may come by later and override this (as they did so effectively with You-Can-Spam), but unless/until they do, each state can certainly represent its interests directly.
Note also that this bill has only passed the Senate; it must still pass the Assembly and get signed. Google has already negotiated several more onerous aspects away, and has an opportunity to do more.
And, the bill, along with its privacy protections (such as not holding onto deleted e-mail), would apply to all e-mail providers when doing business in the state, not just Google.
It may be that Google's stature and coming IPO have crystalized at this particular time many of the long-standing privacy issues with public hosted e-mail systems (and caused some to grossly overrate some "threats"), but that's life. By their nature, they would have eventually ended up in legislatures and courts at some point anyway.
I remember my family getting ads from Time-Life, Publishers Clearinghouse and others with highly customized content. Like nearly 30 years ago. Stuff like this:
Dear Thomas A. Anderson,
Thomas, we are sure that you and the entire the Anderson family in Central City will be glad to know that the next volume in the Time-Life Science Series has already been engraved with the name of Thomas A. Anderson in solid gold lettering.
To receive your copy entitled "Virtual Realities", Mr. Anderson, you need do nothing. We know that your classmates at Owen Patterson High have all been excited to receive this excellent volume. But if, for some reason, you do not wish to avail yourself of this important offer, simply remove the sticker labeled "3809940TAA", affix it to the enclosed post card in the box shown, apply sufficient postage for first class delivery, and mail it back to us within the next 24 hours.
Thank you, Mr. Anderson, and we sincerely hope that you enjoy your new volume.
The cheesier versions had all of the fixed text pre-printed in a dot matrix font intended to look like the customized text. In those versions, the customized text was just as obvious as the example above.
And while the customized part of the pitch only amounted to one or two pages, the magazine connection has been around for a similarly long time. Plenty of magazines have shipped regional versions based on address for decades.
The real news, and sad news it is, is that anyone considers Reason's example earth-shattering. Those who do, have been had without their knowledge for a very long time.
I'll believe it when they survive long enough to produce their own theme parks, not just license characters to Six Flags or equivalent, and especially not to Disneyland.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that there is decent VM software for both Windows and Linux, I will never set up a dual-boot system again. That is the very worst way to get two OSes, particularly competing OSes, on one box. There goes any "need" for a third-party partition program to support two OSes, or competition over a boot sector.
But this can be a false economy...
Every time something that is distributed in binary is rebuilt from source for local use, by definition it's to change some assumption that was inherent in the testing of the original binary (or else the binary distribution would suffice). And with that, some non-0 confidence that was built into the binary release by that testing is wiped out and must be recovered by local analysis and testing (i.e., time and effort) or reduced expectations. Otherwise, it's running on blind faith. This is particularly true with programs that are used frequently, i.e., one expects to depend on them repeatedly. So in my mind, "the best of both worlds" is more meaningful if it refers to fast and reliable apps. I don't care how fast the compiler is if I can't trust the results anymore. That is a different economy equation, and completely justifes the "convenience" of pre-compiled binaries in many applications.
A fair bust. I remembered the number from my admittedly old Halliday and Resnick, 6.02252e23. Even wikipedia's quote of an authoritative source for 1998 has been updated a little as of 2002.
Can version 6.022E23 be far behind?
Somebody rounded down instead of nearest.
I was thinking about stuffing the entries through heavy automation, not simply using computers to make entries versus not using them. And I don't think there was anything wrong with the earlier automated entries either, but the merchant felt compelled to add prizes for public relations purposes nevertheless.
There were also cases of stores caught throwing away hand-written entries while attempting to throw away automated entries that worsened the already bad public relations. Imagine the pummeling Apple could get, and the associated problems ordinary people will have trying to use the site (maybe even including lost transactions and lost money) during this giant DDoS "attack".
I think that battling against each patent one-by-one is going to be a never-ending losing battle
The primary purpose of the EFF's exercise is to publicize this view; in other words, that's the point. It gets people to discuss the issue, write congress, donate, strengthen backbones, etc. It's secondary, though still useful, to actually knock off these particular patents along the way. There is also a lot less personal or even corporate risk doing it this way than violating the patents and hoping they get revoked later.
Might work, huh?
And then maybe Apple will be in the mood to issue duplicate prizes for automated winners.
That would require an expensive change (sufficiently accurate flow or volume measure) to all cars and, worse, all existing cars to get any quick effect. An alternate way might be to do something along the lines of what was done to banks (that used to shave fractions of a cent from interest payments by always rounding down): require the total amount of gas pumped from the storage tank (say, at next refill time) to agree with the sum of the amounts claimed to be dispensed by the pumps. There are many fewer filling stations and pumps to deal with than cars. Another advantage is that rather than looking like a pittance at a few cents per car fill-up, it would be reported as a much larger amount corresponding to all cars filled from that storage tank's worth. There are still a bunch of logistics problems and places to crack it, but the effort still seems much less.
I'll make sure to buy exactly 5.000 gallons :-)
Not necessarily good enough. In the article's KCBS link, the DWM agent used a 5 gallon measure. That was enough to catch 4 of the 5 stations he and the reporter visited. Given the situation, it's apparently not necessary to be any more clever than this.
Well, not an API but a data structure, there apparently is for FAT, but it is under review.
And why stop at a fixed playlist? This has so many {exciting,absurd} possibilities. 1) Offer menu choices. 2) If you've got caller ID, remember the setting for that customer's next call. 3) Think of things that would work well on an open speakerphone that the caller's probably using in a cube.
As for selections, sure, you could go with generic popular music, but, particularly if there are selectable options, I'd try for more things at the absurd/fun/useful end of the scale, like:
That all said, nothing is more annoying, once there is interesting hold conent, than to have it interrupted every 15 seconds reminding the caller that "Your call is important to us, stay on the line to keep your position, blah, blah.". Say that at most once up-front and never again.
A good link to Lang's work is here
Well, the articles mentions that some email providers are blocking GMail due to privacy concerns. Seems like a bunch of hogwash to me.
Sure does. If my ISP is trying to protect me from what it views as generic privacy problems at gmail, what about all of my other recipients (and the closure of those they correspond with) when 1) they are hit with a virus that spews my address or other info everywhere; 2) too-wide discovery in a court that unnecessarily exposes my information (read: start with the entire hard disk); 3) some person in the closure set simply being a jerk? Or worse, my own ISP selling access to me. My ISP is doing precious little about those, they are much more realistic threats, and my ISP has virtually no control (or standing) over some of them. At least I can read gmail's privacy policy, know that it will get discussed in communities like this one, and have some expectation that they will enforce it, unlike smaller ISPs and distant recipients-of-recipients. So why even consider targeting gmail for such a reason?
From the referenced page: The amount of work and planning to do such a thorough charting of the syntax must have been large.
Actually, my old copy of Wilson and Addyman's "A Practical Introduction to Pascal" has (a standard version of) this chart in Appendix I. Mine's the second edition, but the first edition was published in 1978. I know I've seen earlier versions as well.
One of the distinct advantages of Pascal was that its syntax was so straightforward that creating a "railroad normal form" chart like this was relatively simple. You could easily write a parser for the language from scratch as a term project, without parsing tools like lex/yacc.
Though the listed viruses may be new, the actual update was released over a month ago and those of us here should already know better. This is the kind of "timely" information I get from Comcast support.
Sounds just like I've been discovered by the Vogons^H^H^H^H^H^Hspammers, and am suffering the consequences.
Microsoft can't break these applications.
Are you serious, or in denial? There are precious few interfaces in this business that are so carefully and completely defined that they never change, or that are so absolutely backward compatible over time. (The ones that are, are a wonder to behold). For history, look at DOS to Win16 to Win32, or HTML support in IE, all claiming some measure of backward compatibility but with gaping holes. Look at the list of software that breaks when a major OS release comes out, or a service pack, or even a security update. Can you be absolutely certain that you're not depending on any undocumented or risky behavior (that may change later), or some interface that will be found to be a big security problem and have to be closed or changed, or a company with a long record of backward incompatibility (and there are many more than just Microsoft)? The better companies supply notice, tools and support to help deal with the changes, but changes there are, and you have to deal with them.
You can argue whether the primary reasons are conspiracies, innovation, or just thinking more clearly today than yesterday. But the result is the same. I wouldn't hold my breath.
The most bizarre board game I've ever received is called The Tomato Game, (c) Susan A. Tambone. There isn't any other company name or publisher anywhere on it. It's a standard game with a path, tokens, die, and question/action cards that you draw when you land on different spaces. It comes in a box designed to look like a cardboard tomato crate. I grow veggies at home and my wife got this game for me several years ago after finding it advertised in the back of some magazine.
It has the feel of a game written by an instructor at an ag college for people in the tomato industry. Here's a sample question:
No wonder store-bought tomatoes are never ripe.
Or this trick question:
I bet you too thought that the existence of choice E ruled out a combo answer!
Of course, the fun is all of the silliness as people try to guess obscure tomato diseases and "best" practices (by the industry's standards) when noone has a chance. A very surreal experience. Best played in conjunction with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
The average WiFi user was tech savvy too, back when only us computer geeks used it.
Here's a counter-example. Two years ago, the San Jose Mercury published this article by one of the regular tech reviewers. He was unable to get his WiFi setup to work until a tech came over and turned off his firewall. Problem solved; finesse with a sledge hammer. His system's probably a slag heap by now with all of the extra use it's gotten.
I've had a chance to teach (or help teach) several well-past-college adults to program. HTML and its associated friends are a good start, probably because of the immediate feedback and ability to do something fairly useful right away. For example, perhaps she'd like to make a Web site of her own. But if she's really serious, I'd move to some more formal language before returing to the advanced uses of any scripting language. I think I'd pick a language that was designed for teaching, such as Logo or Pascal (despite its age).
The biggest advantage that you have is that it'll be one-on-one and you can adjust to her interest and patience. I don't think I can overstate this, especially with the shower of languages that people have listed here. For example, if your mom majored in math but never programmed, you could go right to something like lisp. If not, then maybe something more statement oriented.
But for teaching serious programming, I'd say that the first two really big road blocks that I've seen for non-technical people learning to program are the difference between a number and a string (and ultimately quoting generally), and indexing (array indexing in HLLs, or registers used as such in assembly language). After that, I'd say it's recursion, particularly for someone with little background in math (has never gotten proof by mathematical induction).
While I might use a scripting language to get over the initial idea of having the computer do something you tell it (and that might be immediately useful), I wouldn't stay with one very long in the beginning. Most have tortuous syntax, particularly with quoting and arrays.
About the road blocks I mentioned:
Number versus string: It seems to be very difficult to get across the idea that these are very different statements (though the differences become more apparent with more complicated expressions and string versus numeric variable types):
My mother took an introductory programming course and this area was a big problem.
Indexing: I think the major issue is the indirection involved, and having to keep track of two things at once (the index and the target). This one hit two adults I've taught.
Hmm. Scissors, irregular polygon, glue, scoring the paper to fold properly. I was thinking of something more clever from that title.
today... beta version= decreased liability (because of the bugs) while still collecting profits/'name-building'/etc
Exactly, on the sentiment, but this is hardly new, and hardly just software. I've seen plenty of microprocessor manuals printed with "PRELIMINARY INFORMATION" long after the procesors were shipping and built into production systems. In the few cases I was able to get an authoritative reason, it was closely related to CYA (such as not wanting to be legally held to the specification if a sufficiently nasty bug in was discovered after shipment). And when this wasn't enough, some then added the "Do not use in life-support applications" disclaimers.
If those users, not to mention the company itself, are in California, then California certainly gets to have a say. Just as the state just did with the recent PUC decision on cell phones. The Feds may come by later and override this (as they did so effectively with You-Can-Spam), but unless/until they do, each state can certainly represent its interests directly.
Note also that this bill has only passed the Senate; it must still pass the Assembly and get signed. Google has already negotiated several more onerous aspects away, and has an opportunity to do more.
And, the bill, along with its privacy protections (such as not holding onto deleted e-mail), would apply to all e-mail providers when doing business in the state, not just Google.It may be that Google's stature and coming IPO have crystalized at this particular time many of the long-standing privacy issues with public hosted e-mail systems (and caused some to grossly overrate some "threats"), but that's life. By their nature, they would have eventually ended up in legislatures and courts at some point anyway.
I remember my family getting ads from Time-Life, Publishers Clearinghouse and others with highly customized content. Like nearly 30 years ago. Stuff like this:
The cheesier versions had all of the fixed text pre-printed in a dot matrix font intended to look like the customized text. In those versions, the customized text was just as obvious as the example above.
And while the customized part of the pitch only amounted to one or two pages, the magazine connection has been around for a similarly long time. Plenty of magazines have shipped regional versions based on address for decades.
The real news, and sad news it is, is that anyone considers Reason's example earth-shattering. Those who do, have been had without their knowledge for a very long time.
I'll believe it when they survive long enough to produce their own theme parks, not just license characters to Six Flags or equivalent, and especially not to Disneyland.