I wonder what the percentages are for corporate users compared with home users. I bet home users are better: My current employer requires out machines to have a *particular* version of Java installed. The internal corporate web site doesn't work on anything newer, or older. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm, not the exception.
I'm constantly amazed at how these internal apps are some of the poorest maintained software. Training applications, time sheets, desktop sharing, CRMs... consistently the poorest quality tools I encounter.
You have to appreciate the irony that the test requires a plug-in. For all I know, the test is the virus. I assumed it would be a series of javascripts that tested vulnerabilities.
It sounds like Watson gets the question the instant it is asked. The humans have to wait for Alex to read it.
I am faster at Jeopardy if I turn off the sound. I cannot listen and read to the same text simultaneously. Do other people experience this? So the host slows me down.
In the future, some guy will be sitting around with his best buddy watching watching football while his personal robot does his housework, balances his budget, finishes his homework, and organizes his love life. The robot will pause to tell a joke it just thought up spontaneously. After he ROFL, the guy will say to his friend "Dude, my new SuperRobot 2400+ is so smart!"
His friend, a computer programmer, will say "That isn't artificial intelligence. It's just a computer program."
It does not involve any artificial intelligence or machine intelligence at all
One beauty of artificial intelligence is that once you have solved an AI problem, it is no longer an AI problem. It's becomes an algorithm, or a database problem, or a statistics problem, etc.
Chess was once considered AI. Heck, tic-tac-toe was once considered AI. Solving equations and integration were once considered AI (and a certain level, still is). Playing Jeopardy is typically considered a measure of human intelligence. So it is funny that having a computer do it is not considered artificial intelligence.
Buying a used satellite is like buying a used bus... the only reason someone would sell it is because it has become cheaper to buy a new one than to maintain the old one!
Nice quip, but it isn't true.
First of all, satellites don't have maintenance, unless it is something like the hubble telescope. You don't call your local tech support guy and have him fly up there and fix some wiring. If they don't work, you de-orbit them. So the maintenance cost is zero.
Next, "cheaper to buy a new one" is unlikely to be true given the launch costs.
Unfortunately, the best I can do is turn off the feature entirely. ClearType tuner doesn't let you have different settings on each monitor. Supposedly, this is fixed in Windows 7 but in fact it is not. I have an open bug report with Microsoft on it. Oh well...
I keep seeing articles saying scrypt is better than bcrypt, or vice-versa. I don't know which is right. But either way, SHA and MD5 are not the way to go.
This has to be the most efficient aircraft ever made: those paper airplanes got a glide ratio of 200:1! That's insane! Comparatively, most aircraft get glide ratios around 15:1.
According to the article they launched from Wolfsburg, Germany and some landed in Bangalore, India. Wolfram alpha says that is >7000km. The 122,00 feet is about 37km.
So where is this? I was not aware of any place (in the US) that had laws regarding who can be fired or when, etc. I know some companies make policies about this to prevent lawsuits, but I wasn't aware of any laws to that effect.
I have dual monitors, and I run one of them that way. One problem is that subpixel anti-aliasing like ClearType, etc. don't work. They just blur the screen.
True, but there is a big difference between "Shut down or I will send tanks to your building" and a legal request. It takes a lot more guts to send the military, and tends to provoke the people. When you hide behind the law, it seems more legitimate.
I'll never understand why people thought giving companies the ability to fire for "no" reason was a good thing
No one ever gave them that right. They already had it. Laws take away rights. So the question is not "Why did we grant employers the ability to fire people without reason" the question is "Why would we want to take away employers rights to fire people without reason."
The only limitations I see would be on race, creed, or religion. This particular situation falls into "creed."
I have to clarify: There is no such thing as a voided warranty. This is a misunderstanding of you rights.
Suppose the warranty says "This warranty will repair any damage due to improper workmanship." Or maybe it says "This warranty covers damage that is not the result of user negligence such as immersion in water, fire,..."
When you bring in a phone that was drowned and immolated they can refuse to replace it. They didn't void the warranty: they followed the warranty. A warranty is a legal contract. If you didn't damage the product and they still refuse to replace it, you can take them to court to make them follow the letter of the contract. By not following the contract, the burden of proof is upon them to show that you damaged the product. It isn't your burden to prove that you didn't damage the product. They can't "void" the warranty for any reason they want, just like you cannot "void" your mortgage and refuse to pay.
Your situation is a perfect example of what our future might look like: 1) NO DUE PROCESS. 2) MONOPOLY This is a bad combination:
Imagine if this was a retail store, not a web site. Perhaps they refuse to let you in until you told them your real name. And they don't believe you when you tell them it is Anti. You could make a scene, have people boycott the store, talk to the manager, and probably sue them for discrimination. But Facebook is a virtual entity - what is their tech support phone number? Where is there a store where you can talk to a manager? Where can you go to make a scene? And how can you sue them for denying you a free service? This is where there is NO DUE PROCESS.
In a real store, you would just give them the finger and head to another store. But that doesn't work in the online because if your friends use Facebook, you can't see their updates with MySpace or LinkedIn. It doesn't work that way. This is the MONOPOLY part. We have an open system of commerce - I can buy something from retail store A, or retail store B, and I get the same item. But information services are a closed system. I can't connect to my friends unless I use the same proprietary system that they do.
This is a really bad situation - and it might be the future unless we stop it. Sorry to get all Richard Stallman on everyone, but this is why we should not use closed systems like Facebook or Myspace for anything important. Don't store data in "the cloud" - it's DRM for your life.
What you're talking about is one of my most favorite phrases: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". In short, embryos will traverse the evolutionary tree as they develop. While not always true, it's worth reading about.
Just to clarify: it is not true at all. The phrase Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny refers to a theory from the 1800s that has since been disproved. Scientists really hoped it would be true, because it would make reconstructing evolution much much easier. Alas, it does not happen.
That Daily Mail article by the OP is just some random speculation about how we might create dinosaurs, with nothing scientific in it.
The exception I found is in the Wikipedia article, which claims it to be true in some very small cases but the section is marked as citing no references, and it disagrees with the rest of the article.
That doesn't make sense. That's like saying you want electricity to power your television, but you don't need electricity to power your radio, so you want a discount. You are charged for the amount of electricity, not what you use it for. Same thing with an ISP: you are charged for your bandwidth, not what you do with it. Not using Yahoo doesn't make any difference to the ISP.
Please don't draw these clear "generation" lines that don't really exist. If you don't like entitlement programs, join the constitutionalists and the libertarians against the problem in general, instead of blaming some overly broad group. No one should be able to default on mortgages they can't pay then sit around collecting Medicare for the rest of their lives - it doesn't matter if they are Generation X, Y, Z, or whatever.
Perhaps this law should also apply to books. Books containing violence, homosexual behavior, etc should have similar warning labels. For example, "The Catcher in the Rye" has been linked to two famous political assassins, so perhaps readers should be informed. And The Bible would be X-rated if there was a book rating system at all.
Now that I think about it, perhaps ideas should be rated and labeled too. Ideas can be a poison, leading to violence. But how can we label ideas? Do we need to label people? How can we make this work?
Yes. It does this to me too. And I have one comment I can't see at all. http://slashdot.org/~MobyDisk/comments If I click on the post "Re:How to train: yaay! Tue Jan 25, '11 03:42 PM" I see nothing.
I am glad to see this happening, but saddened that it is such a big deal. In the corporate world, no CFO gives a presentation without slides showing the information and references to back it up. In every board room, you have a projector, a conference call system, and attendees with laptops. Every statement is cited with specific numbers and backed-up with links and references.
But in politics, someone can hold a speech or a debate and there are no slides, no links, and no references. Two candidates in a debate can quote entirely different numbers for the same thing, and even change their numbers from speech to speech. It it is up to the listeners to find sources after the fact. It is really quite silly. If businessmen operated like political candidates they would be ousted after the first board meeting.
I always imagined that if I was up there I would say "The US imports XXX barrels of oil, according to Gartner research" and a slide would appear showing the number within context of other nations, and a link to the research report. I know that only.01% of people would actually look that up, but much like open source, not everyone has to do that. It's just all a part of promoting transparency and accuracy. If the other side wants to quote a different number, that's fine, then they can post their links as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the percentages are for corporate users compared with home users. I bet home users are better: My current employer requires out machines to have a *particular* version of Java installed. The internal corporate web site doesn't work on anything newer, or older. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm, not the exception.
I'm constantly amazed at how these internal apps are some of the poorest maintained software. Training applications, time sheets, desktop sharing, CRMs ... consistently the poorest quality tools I encounter.
You have to appreciate the irony that the test requires a plug-in. For all I know, the test is the virus. I assumed it would be a series of javascripts that tested vulnerabilities.
It sounds like Watson gets the question the instant it is asked. The humans have to wait for Alex to read it.
I am faster at Jeopardy if I turn off the sound. I cannot listen and read to the same text simultaneously. Do other people experience this? So the host slows me down.
Even if they pass this law it cannot impact Wikileaks because it would be ex-post-facto. You can't make something illegal after the fact.
In the future, some guy will be sitting around with his best buddy watching watching football while his personal robot does his housework, balances his budget, finishes his homework, and organizes his love life. The robot will pause to tell a joke it just thought up spontaneously. After he ROFL, the guy will say to his friend "Dude, my new SuperRobot 2400+ is so smart!"
His friend, a computer programmer, will say "That isn't artificial intelligence. It's just a computer program."
Interesting idea. A Google search revealed that you aren't the first to think of this:
Username as password salt
Non-random salt for password hashes
(assuming the salt is system wide, not per user)
Salt should be per user. (Although I see what you mean: system wide + username = per user)
It does not involve any artificial intelligence or machine intelligence at all
One beauty of artificial intelligence is that once you have solved an AI problem, it is no longer an AI problem. It's becomes an algorithm, or a database problem, or a statistics problem, etc.
Chess was once considered AI. Heck, tic-tac-toe was once considered AI. Solving equations and integration were once considered AI (and a certain level, still is). Playing Jeopardy is typically considered a measure of human intelligence. So it is funny that having a computer do it is not considered artificial intelligence.
I'm glad someone else posted this. Is it even possible to a geosynchronous satellite?
Buying a used satellite is like buying a used bus... the only reason someone would sell it is because it has become cheaper to buy a new one than to maintain the old one!
Nice quip, but it isn't true.
First of all, satellites don't have maintenance, unless it is something like the hubble telescope. You don't call your local tech support guy and have him fly up there and fix some wiring. If they don't work, you de-orbit them. So the maintenance cost is zero.
Next, "cheaper to buy a new one" is unlikely to be true given the launch costs.
Unfortunately, the best I can do is turn off the feature entirely. ClearType tuner doesn't let you have different settings on each monitor. Supposedly, this is fixed in Windows 7 but in fact it is not. I have an open bug report with Microsoft on it. Oh well...
The parent posted the correct answer. SHA + salt is not the current best practice. Let me expand on the AC's post.
Like many coders, I thought you were supposed to calculate Hash(password + salt). Then store the salt, and the resulting hash. But hash functions are designed for speed, not security. The correct solution is to use a Key Derivation Function instead. These functions are intentionally slower and harder to reverse or brute-force. They are the kinds of functions used to generate encryption keys from passwords. Ex: I type "supersecret123" and the computer must generate a 128-bit key from that. It doesn't just hash it. It uses a KDF.
I keep seeing articles saying scrypt is better than bcrypt, or vice-versa. I don't know which is right. But either way, SHA and MD5 are not the way to go.
This has to be the most efficient aircraft ever made: those paper airplanes got a glide ratio of 200:1! That's insane! Comparatively, most aircraft get glide ratios around 15:1.
According to the article they launched from Wolfsburg, Germany and some landed in Bangalore, India. Wolfram alpha says that is >7000km. The 122,00 feet is about 37km.
So where is this? I was not aware of any place (in the US) that had laws regarding who can be fired or when, etc. I know some companies make policies about this to prevent lawsuits, but I wasn't aware of any laws to that effect.
A reminder that New Hampshire is also considering approval voting. Is this a result of the same geek culture?
I have dual monitors, and I run one of them that way. One problem is that subpixel anti-aliasing like ClearType, etc. don't work. They just blur the screen.
True, but there is a big difference between "Shut down or I will send tanks to your building" and a legal request. It takes a lot more guts to send the military, and tends to provoke the people. When you hide behind the law, it seems more legitimate.
I'll never understand why people thought giving companies the ability to fire for "no" reason was a good thing
No one ever gave them that right. They already had it. Laws take away rights. So the question is not "Why did we grant employers the ability to fire people without reason" the question is "Why would we want to take away employers rights to fire people without reason."
The only limitations I see would be on race, creed, or religion. This particular situation falls into "creed."
I have to clarify: There is no such thing as a voided warranty. This is a misunderstanding of you rights.
Suppose the warranty says "This warranty will repair any damage due to improper workmanship." Or maybe it says "This warranty covers damage that is not the result of user negligence such as immersion in water, fire, ..."
When you bring in a phone that was drowned and immolated they can refuse to replace it. They didn't void the warranty: they followed the warranty. A warranty is a legal contract. If you didn't damage the product and they still refuse to replace it, you can take them to court to make them follow the letter of the contract. By not following the contract, the burden of proof is upon them to show that you damaged the product. It isn't your burden to prove that you didn't damage the product. They can't "void" the warranty for any reason they want, just like you cannot "void" your mortgage and refuse to pay.
Your situation is a perfect example of what our future might look like:
1) NO DUE PROCESS.
2) MONOPOLY
This is a bad combination:
Imagine if this was a retail store, not a web site. Perhaps they refuse to let you in until you told them your real name. And they don't believe you when you tell them it is Anti. You could make a scene, have people boycott the store, talk to the manager, and probably sue them for discrimination. But Facebook is a virtual entity - what is their tech support phone number? Where is there a store where you can talk to a manager? Where can you go to make a scene? And how can you sue them for denying you a free service? This is where there is NO DUE PROCESS.
In a real store, you would just give them the finger and head to another store. But that doesn't work in the online because if your friends use Facebook, you can't see their updates with MySpace or LinkedIn. It doesn't work that way. This is the MONOPOLY part. We have an open system of commerce - I can buy something from retail store A, or retail store B, and I get the same item. But information services are a closed system. I can't connect to my friends unless I use the same proprietary system that they do.
This is a really bad situation - and it might be the future unless we stop it. Sorry to get all Richard Stallman on everyone, but this is why we should not use closed systems like Facebook or Myspace for anything important. Don't store data in "the cloud" - it's DRM for your life.
What you're talking about is one of my most favorite phrases: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". In short, embryos will traverse the evolutionary tree as they develop. While not always true, it's worth reading about.
Just to clarify: it is not true at all. The phrase Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny refers to a theory from the 1800s that has since been disproved. Scientists really hoped it would be true, because it would make reconstructing evolution much much easier. Alas, it does not happen.
That Daily Mail article by the OP is just some random speculation about how we might create dinosaurs, with nothing scientific in it.
The exception I found is in the Wikipedia article, which claims it to be true in some very small cases but the section is marked as citing no references, and it disagrees with the rest of the article.
That doesn't make sense. That's like saying you want electricity to power your television, but you don't need electricity to power your radio, so you want a discount. You are charged for the amount of electricity, not what you use it for. Same thing with an ISP: you are charged for your bandwidth, not what you do with it. Not using Yahoo doesn't make any difference to the ISP.
Please don't draw these clear "generation" lines that don't really exist. If you don't like entitlement programs, join the constitutionalists and the libertarians against the problem in general, instead of blaming some overly broad group. No one should be able to default on mortgages they can't pay then sit around collecting Medicare for the rest of their lives - it doesn't matter if they are Generation X, Y, Z, or whatever.
Perhaps this law should also apply to books. Books containing violence, homosexual behavior, etc should have similar warning labels. For example, "The Catcher in the Rye" has been linked to two famous political assassins, so perhaps readers should be informed. And The Bible would be X-rated if there was a book rating system at all.
Now that I think about it, perhaps ideas should be rated and labeled too. Ideas can be a poison, leading to violence. But how can we label ideas? Do we need to label people? How can we make this work?
(No, this post is not to be taken literally)
Yes. It does this to me too. And I have one comment I can't see at all.
http://slashdot.org/~MobyDisk/comments
If I click on the post "Re:How to train: yaay! Tue Jan 25, '11 03:42 PM" I see nothing.
I am glad to see this happening, but saddened that it is such a big deal. In the corporate world, no CFO gives a presentation without slides showing the information and references to back it up. In every board room, you have a projector, a conference call system, and attendees with laptops. Every statement is cited with specific numbers and backed-up with links and references.
But in politics, someone can hold a speech or a debate and there are no slides, no links, and no references. Two candidates in a debate can quote entirely different numbers for the same thing, and even change their numbers from speech to speech. It it is up to the listeners to find sources after the fact. It is really quite silly. If businessmen operated like political candidates they would be ousted after the first board meeting.
I always imagined that if I was up there I would say "The US imports XXX barrels of oil, according to Gartner research" and a slide would appear showing the number within context of other nations, and a link to the research report. I know that only .01% of people would actually look that up, but much like open source, not everyone has to do that. It's just all a part of promoting transparency and accuracy. If the other side wants to quote a different number, that's fine, then they can post their links as well.