Can't you use something like firstname.lastname@your-google-id.gmail.com to tag your photos? If you do that, then Google will only know that the person who has the given first and last name is the one that is known by you. It doesn't correlate with another person with the same first and last name known by someone else.
Or simply firstname.lastname@example.com could cause many false correlation when two different people have the same first and last names. This also thwarts attempts to do data mining.
For example, if I have to reference data structure by pointers, then off by one means I reference the wrong data. If the wrong data is expected to contain a pointer, then it will be totally wrong and I get segmentation fault. If I write a for loop for (i = 0; i lt; n; i++) {...}, and the least significant bit is ignored, then the for loop never makes progress (and never terminates). If i is only successfully incremented 50% of the time, then the for loop runs twice as much as it needs to run. Suppose you are copying files with region indexed by i, you may copy the same region multiple times. How is that faster and more efficient?
Sacrificing accuracy is so far only applicable for floating point computation, and in many cases this sacrifice has already been made. Some hardware lacks IEEE 754 rounding, and I don't think most people would notice that. Most people just use a double or even long double, which seem to provide satisfactory numeric accuracy for most purposes, and don't bother with error analysis of their code.
Last point, if you're going to write a banking system, please under no circumstance use floating point to represent balances. Use an arbitrary precision integer library such as GMP, which works similar to representing each number as a string with arbitrary length but is implemented in a more compact binary format.
Sending out spam to counter spam is bringing justice by breaking a law.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
These mailing lists as well as end users would have to deal with additional volume of spam.
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (you need to compete with spam filters) (X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (they never learn)
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (you're adding to the volume of spam bandwidth)
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I know people who never watch the news on TV, only their favorite shows. The overlay banners will only be shown on analog channel, so while annoying, I think this is a fair thing to do. Once you take action, the annoyance goes away.
I wonder why don't TV stations show an overlay banner saying "This station is available on digital channel ##. The analog channel will be discontinued at DATE. Please contact your local electronics store for how to receive digital broadcast."
Having people who watch analog TV suddenly go blank without knowing they should switch to digital, that is the colossal failure of broadcast media that can't disseminate information to their audience.
But there has to be a realisation that not all teachers need to use IT to teach their subject and more importantly, to them, knowledge of open source software is completely and utterly irrelevant knowledge for what they need to do their job.
You never know if the knowledge is completely and utterly irrelevant. Someone with that knowledge could invent creative uses.
For example, an English teacher could tell his/her students to use Google Documents. At the very least, nobody needs to buy word processor software, and the teacher can see the latest work of a student before the due date of assignment and identify problems early. If the teacher is willing, he/she could sign on to instant messenger and help the students out in the evenings when they do homework. They can collaborate directly on the paper the student is writing in almost real-time.
Also, revision history could help exposing plagiarism by showing abnormal editing pattern.
I think the problem is that most people have such painful memory at school, so much that the last thing they consider is to go back to school and teach for the rest of their lives. Besides the perceived bad work environment, many people also consider the salary too low to be a viable career option. But if you can't increase the salary, at least improve the work environment to make it better. This will attract more qualified candidates and cause a competition to increase the teachers' knowledge level.
Fortunately, making the work environment better for teachers is something you can do as a student. Try to build a good relationship with your teachers and make them feel appreciated for what they do. This increases your chance of getting better teachers. Maybe one day you will consider teaching as a career, making a change to education in order to address the things you criticize now.
Here in Korea, 90% coverage roughly translates as 1+ connections per household. Broadband routers permeate every apartment complex and many complexes offer in-house fiber-optic for half the rate of an outside company's rate.
You mean in Seoul or some metropolitan of Korea, as opposed to the whole Korea? For what it's worth, it's also easier to get fiber optics in metropolitan area in the US too. Not so easy if you live 30 miles into the woods. Try to find a decent patch of bushes in Korea...
Plus, many grandparents I know DO have broadband because they live with their children or vice versa.
You see, that's a major cultural difference than the US, where adult offspring seldom lives with the parents, let alone grandparents. Ever heard of the derogatory expression that someone still lives in his parents' basement?
I'm from Taiwan, which claims 100% broadband coverage by February 2008, but that just means the service is available to those who want it. It's a meaningless measure for broadband penetration.
There are many things that indicate lack of progress in the US, but broadband ain't one of them. Try to criticize social security, insurance, and the high cost of medical care. Try to criticize why construction workers here are so expensive and inefficient (blame it on the union?). Criticize their lack of appreciation in math and science education. Perhaps even the lack of a high speed railroad. These are real problems. Broadband is just a superficial measure.
Do you guys seriously think that some Asian country that touts 90% coverage means 90% of residents access the Internet through broadband? Surely, they also have more than 10% old grandparents who don't use computers. Their "coverage" is defined as "if they wanted to, they could get it" as opposed to the actual subscription rate. It's just a different definition of coverage, in terms of which I think the US has a pretty good coverage already (although it could always be cheaper and faster).
I agree with you that the story feels fictional, and the right decision Kelly should make is to keep Stuart, the valuable people-manager asset. It should be clear to Kelly that Stuart should be kept because all his reports show loyalty to him.
However, the story, albeit exaggerated, tries to make a point that I believe is still very valid. That is, people have a tendency to make what they think as the rational decision based on the wrong considerations and influences. In the story, Kelly is exploited by Doug in a particular way to make the bad decision.
While you probably shouldn't go out and back-stab people, it is pertinent that you stay alert of someone who try to back-stab you and try to neutralize the situation as best as you can. If you're in a situation where there is little you can do, then just rest assured that someday, somewhere, somebody will appreciate you doing the right thing.
If anyone can recover data from a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda hard drive, I suspect $500 isn't enough financial incentive for that person to reveal his/her ability to do it. $500,000, then we're talking.
This is also an excellent case study in why DRM is retarded. As you say, this is some of the tightest security ever found. Yet, it has been broken by some very smart people. Such is the fate of any DRM that is sufficiently widespread that smart people care to go after it.
If you watch the video, you'd see the only reason they're able to break it is because the bootrom (initially run by the hardware) is modifiable yet not signature checked. I suppose that's because they want to be able to upgrade the bootrom but signature checking is only implemented in software and not hardware. All the NOR and NAND flash memory and the processor is built inside an integrated chip, so it is possible that future revisions of the chip will also integrate a TPM to verify the signature of bootrom. Let's suppose Apple will do that. You will then have a completely working DRM framework on the iPhone.
TPM doesn't work on PC because you always have access to hardware without TPM, allowing you to run whatever you want and patch the software that requires TPM such as the hackintosh Mac OS X. However, for the iPhone, you can only buy the hardware from Apple that always has TPM on it (or settle for a previous generation iPhone without TPM). The whole point of iPhone craze is that you want to buy iPhone made by Apple, and all the restrictions follow from that, including choice of carrier and applications you can run.
Code signing, for example. I really like the idea as a potential security measure for users/administrators. When I download Firefox, the fact that it is signed by Mozilla gives me a pretty high degree of certainty that it is legit, safe code.
Do you have any means to verify that Firefox certificate is signed by someone you could trust? I could generate a certificate that looks like it's issued by Mozilla, and then sign a tempered copy of Firefox with it. Even if you can verify the mozilla.org certificate, the chain of trust ultimately leads to a root certificate that you must trust. Are you really sure that VeriSign or Thawte or other certificate issuing institutions cannot be compromised? I remember a past Slashdot story about one of the root issuer happily generating certificate for any domain name without verification.
Fortunately, there are people like this that will break their DRM, so you can use it as you wish.
If you have to use Apple's iPhone, your freedom is already automatically compromised, if not now, sooner or later.
The article seems to assume that bad programmers write slow but correct code, which is a big assumption. But the observation on cost also means that good programmers should focus on correctness rather than performance.
Just to illustrate how difficult it is to get correctness right, on page 56 of The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike---very highly regarded book and highly regarded authors---there is a hash table lookup function that is combined with insert to perform optional insertion when the key is not found in the table. It assumes that the value argument can be safely discarded if insertion is not performed. That assumption works fine with integers, but not with pointers to memory objects, file descriptors, or any handle to a resource. An inexperienced programmer trying to generalize int value to void *value will induce memory leak on behalf of the user of the function.
Zen asserts that certain truths can only be asserted without affirmation or negation, therefore there is no contradiction. It's a bit like the superposition of wave functions...or just a statement that, by trying to classify the world in black and white terms, we fall into error.
That's not what Wikipedia says about Zen. Actually, what Wikipedia says is more like you discover Zen within yourself, so whatever the stupid neurons in your brain happen to make a random connection to want to believe in something, that becomes Zen.
Therefore, nobody knows what Zen is, and I'm free to make up whatever I want to say about Zen.
Gee, which idiot modded you offtopic? I side with you by saying again that C is the only language that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot very very easily, and it requires a lot of discipline to program.
Boys and girls, I hope TFA is not the way you learn about these world's religions or programming languages for that matter, because the author apparently is knowledgeable in neither religion nor programming languages.
C is not restrictive, so that's not its problem. Contrary to Judaism that has strict laws, the lack of laws in (the early days of) C makes your program unportable and difficult to understand by follow programmers who understands the semantics differently. The only similarity between C and Judaism is that, despite C is later standardized, you still get imperfect compiler implementations and programmers (analogy to rabbis and priests) who just can't obey the laws due to their original sins.
The claim that Christianity voids many of the old laws is non-sense. Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17). Java is not theoretically based on C. Java lacks pointer arithmetic, for example. The prevalence of garbage collector in Java also means that you can be sloppy in managing resources (do not have to use the resource you allocated or use a resource multiple times), which you have to do very carefully in C (resources have exactly one ownership). Compare these two languages to classical proposition logic and linear logic, and they are very different in theory.
Cafeterial Christianity is a derogatory term describing people who pick and choose what they want to follow from the bible. Humm, maybe the author does know PHP very well.
C++ cannot be Islam because it's a faithful extension (i.e. descendant) of C, and not a sibling to it. Islam and Judeo-Christianity are related by blood as siblings. The root of Islam traces back to Ismael, the illegitimate son of Abraham who has another son Issac who begets Jacob, the father of Israelites. Many of the Christian doctrines have analogy in Islam but they're quite different. This is more like comparing Java and C#, if Java is Christianity and C# is Islam.
Mormonism is based on some golden tablets with words written on them that nobody has seen but the farm boy who discovered it. The boy believed that all the Christian churches are corrupted in teaching. I don't know if that's the reason why Microsoft made C#, that it believes all programming languages are corrupted. I think the origin of C# is because Microsoft wants to build a common language runtime (CLR).
Lisp is based on lambda calculus, a set of very simple syntax and evaluation rules that turns out to be a very powerful computation model. Zen Buddhism only has rules that contradict themselves, i.e. change is the only thing that doesn't change, variety is void and void is variety, the four majors are empty. It's impossible to argue against Zen Buddhism's beliefs because an inconsistent logical system can be used to prove falsehood and anything. Lambda calculus, on the other hand, is the basis of many languages (Simply Typed Lambda Calculus, System F, ML) that are proven to be sound.
Taoism believes "inaction for action", which can be interpreted to mean following and not intervening with the natural flow. The "call by need" evaluation semantics of Haskell doesn't make it an inaction. It's action by demand.
Erlang as Hinduism by comparing multiple processes to simultaneous dieties? What the crack? Then POSIX threads (pthread) is what, Roman and Greek gods?
I think I'll stop here, as the list grows more and more ridiculous.
Besides, it's not clear to me that we're going to come up with much better compression methods for static images, or that we really need to bother coming up with much better compression methods for static images, which means it isn't that unlikely we'll still be using JPEG in 30 years.
We already have. It's called JPEG 2000, using wavelet as opposed to DCT to compress the image. This gets rid of the blocking effect prevalently observed in highly compressed JPEG files. However, I don't see JPEG 2000 making JPEG obsolete for various reasons.
There is already a vast amount of image in JPEG format, and format conversion contributes non-trivial loss in image quality, so there is incentive to retrieve images in that format even if it becomes archaic.
Given the amount of storage we have nowadays, image size is peanuts, so there is less stress in developing highly efficient image compression algorithms. A 20 megapixel image sensor will produce a raw (uncompressed) file at about 40MB. A BD-R disc at 30GB can store 750 such images.
JPEG in high quality mode does not really exhibit blocking problem, so it's not like JPEG 2000 is addressing a critical flaw of the JPEG format.
However, there is still much research to be done on inter-frame compression used for motion pictures. I think we had hit a limit in intra-frame compression, so the focus for highly efficient video codec has been on synthesizing interpolated frames from neighboring frames. At this point, I think video codecs, even H.264, still stands a high chance to become obsolete within the next decade.
On your resume, try to highlight your significant personal projects and why you think they are cool. Your resume scores you interviews. And on your interview, I don't think impressing your interviewer is the goal, but you do need to show you're up to what you claim to be on the resume. Your personal projects can become an advantageous conversation piece during the interview. Try to have a good time with the interviewers because they may be having a long day as well.
According to this Bulk E-mailing Guidelines, only the university offices are permitted to bulk mail changes to university policies or procedures. Not the students.
However, their definition for bulk mail is any message sent to up to 20--30 people (large committee or work group) within 2 days. I wonder if she can send her announcement to 28 people at a time in 14 batches, or 28 days, in order to evade the criteria for bulk mail.
Another way to spread her message faster is to e-mail department secretaries and ask them to forward her message to professors in the department. This way, in the first 4 days, she'll be able to contact 60 departments. If some departments agree to do her a favor, that should reduce the number of professors she has to e-mail individually and reduce the risk of being accused of bulk mailing.
Or ask 14 friends to each forward her message to 28 professors at the same time. I think the accusation for bulk mailing will be much more difficult to hold for 14 people at once, each does not violate MSU bulk e-mail policy individually.
Let's be careful with the notion of virtual address space and page/swap file. Virtual address space is a hardware feature that allows any physical memory to be mapped to any address seen by the program in the granularity of pages (typically 4kb), and that part is almost free thanks to TLB. Virtual address space also allows an address to be backed by no physical memory, in which case the operating system will be notified if a program tries to access that address. If there was formerly a memory page swapped out to disk, the OS brings it in (possibly swapping another page out) and continues the program. If not, the OS aborts the program. Virtual address space and page/swap file are altogether called virtual memory management.
I could be mistaken, but I thought Windows requires each physical memory page to be backed by something on disk, either page file or memory mapped files (e.g. all executables and dlls are like that, which is why you can't remove executable files on disk when the program is still running). I think that's why the ask slashdot poster sees as much usage of "virtual memory" (here used to mean page file) as "physical memory."
It's not censorship but an editorial issue. I don't think it's the lack of meritocracy. The uncertainty in crowd rating is just an amplification that even professional critics can disagree randomly once the subject reaches a certain quality level.
The only minor fault I would possibly find if I were nitpicking in the current rating system is that it typically requires a basis of comparison to a pool of existing works. However, a subject can be so unfamiliar to the audience, for example a new genre of music or a new musical instrument, a new presentation of film, a new material or approach to sculpting, a new language for writing, or a new idea that doesn't relate well to existing intuition, that could not be rated in any capacity because of the lack of comparison. The consequence is that people are encouraged to refine existing ideas or practices rather than making completely new ones from scratch.
Such a bias in skewing motivation for creativity is probably inevitable but still useful. Otherwise, we would be left with a collection of work with crude, primitive, and unrefined practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't you use something like firstname.lastname@your-google-id.gmail.com to tag your photos? If you do that, then Google will only know that the person who has the given first and last name is the one that is known by you. It doesn't correlate with another person with the same first and last name known by someone else.
Or simply firstname.lastname@example.com could cause many false correlation when two different people have the same first and last names. This also thwarts attempts to do data mining.
For example, if I have to reference data structure by pointers, then off by one means I reference the wrong data. If the wrong data is expected to contain a pointer, then it will be totally wrong and I get segmentation fault. If I write a for loop for (i = 0; i lt; n; i++) {...}, and the least significant bit is ignored, then the for loop never makes progress (and never terminates). If i is only successfully incremented 50% of the time, then the for loop runs twice as much as it needs to run. Suppose you are copying files with region indexed by i, you may copy the same region multiple times. How is that faster and more efficient?
Sacrificing accuracy is so far only applicable for floating point computation, and in many cases this sacrifice has already been made. Some hardware lacks IEEE 754 rounding, and I don't think most people would notice that. Most people just use a double or even long double, which seem to provide satisfactory numeric accuracy for most purposes, and don't bother with error analysis of their code.
Last point, if you're going to write a banking system, please under no circumstance use floating point to represent balances. Use an arbitrary precision integer library such as GMP, which works similar to representing each number as a string with arbitrary length but is implemented in a more compact binary format.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
Sending out spam to counter spam is bringing justice by breaking a law.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
These mailing lists as well as end users would have to deal with additional volume of spam.
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (you need to compete with spam filters)
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (they never learn)
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (you're adding to the volume of spam bandwidth)
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I know people who never watch the news on TV, only their favorite shows. The overlay banners will only be shown on analog channel, so while annoying, I think this is a fair thing to do. Once you take action, the annoyance goes away.
I wonder why don't TV stations show an overlay banner saying "This station is available on digital channel ##. The analog channel will be discontinued at DATE. Please contact your local electronics store for how to receive digital broadcast."
Having people who watch analog TV suddenly go blank without knowing they should switch to digital, that is the colossal failure of broadcast media that can't disseminate information to their audience.
You never know if the knowledge is completely and utterly irrelevant. Someone with that knowledge could invent creative uses.
For example, an English teacher could tell his/her students to use Google Documents. At the very least, nobody needs to buy word processor software, and the teacher can see the latest work of a student before the due date of assignment and identify problems early. If the teacher is willing, he/she could sign on to instant messenger and help the students out in the evenings when they do homework. They can collaborate directly on the paper the student is writing in almost real-time.
Also, revision history could help exposing plagiarism by showing abnormal editing pattern.
I think the problem is that most people have such painful memory at school, so much that the last thing they consider is to go back to school and teach for the rest of their lives. Besides the perceived bad work environment, many people also consider the salary too low to be a viable career option. But if you can't increase the salary, at least improve the work environment to make it better. This will attract more qualified candidates and cause a competition to increase the teachers' knowledge level.
Fortunately, making the work environment better for teachers is something you can do as a student. Try to build a good relationship with your teachers and make them feel appreciated for what they do. This increases your chance of getting better teachers. Maybe one day you will consider teaching as a career, making a change to education in order to address the things you criticize now.
You mean in Seoul or some metropolitan of Korea, as opposed to the whole Korea? For what it's worth, it's also easier to get fiber optics in metropolitan area in the US too. Not so easy if you live 30 miles into the woods. Try to find a decent patch of bushes in Korea...
You see, that's a major cultural difference than the US, where adult offspring seldom lives with the parents, let alone grandparents. Ever heard of the derogatory expression that someone still lives in his parents' basement?
I'm from Taiwan, which claims 100% broadband coverage by February 2008, but that just means the service is available to those who want it. It's a meaningless measure for broadband penetration.
There are many things that indicate lack of progress in the US, but broadband ain't one of them. Try to criticize social security, insurance, and the high cost of medical care. Try to criticize why construction workers here are so expensive and inefficient (blame it on the union?). Criticize their lack of appreciation in math and science education. Perhaps even the lack of a high speed railroad. These are real problems. Broadband is just a superficial measure.
Do you guys seriously think that some Asian country that touts 90% coverage means 90% of residents access the Internet through broadband? Surely, they also have more than 10% old grandparents who don't use computers. Their "coverage" is defined as "if they wanted to, they could get it" as opposed to the actual subscription rate. It's just a different definition of coverage, in terms of which I think the US has a pretty good coverage already (although it could always be cheaper and faster).
Some people have it confused the other way around. They assume since they don't get to kiss any pretty girls, they must be nice guys.
I agree with you that the story feels fictional, and the right decision Kelly should make is to keep Stuart, the valuable people-manager asset. It should be clear to Kelly that Stuart should be kept because all his reports show loyalty to him.
However, the story, albeit exaggerated, tries to make a point that I believe is still very valid. That is, people have a tendency to make what they think as the rational decision based on the wrong considerations and influences. In the story, Kelly is exploited by Doug in a particular way to make the bad decision.
While you probably shouldn't go out and back-stab people, it is pertinent that you stay alert of someone who try to back-stab you and try to neutralize the situation as best as you can. If you're in a situation where there is little you can do, then just rest assured that someday, somewhere, somebody will appreciate you doing the right thing.
If anyone can recover data from a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda hard drive, I suspect $500 isn't enough financial incentive for that person to reveal his/her ability to do it. $500,000, then we're talking.
RIAA caught lying about firing MediaSentry.
If you watch the video, you'd see the only reason they're able to break it is because the bootrom (initially run by the hardware) is modifiable yet not signature checked. I suppose that's because they want to be able to upgrade the bootrom but signature checking is only implemented in software and not hardware. All the NOR and NAND flash memory and the processor is built inside an integrated chip, so it is possible that future revisions of the chip will also integrate a TPM to verify the signature of bootrom. Let's suppose Apple will do that. You will then have a completely working DRM framework on the iPhone.
TPM doesn't work on PC because you always have access to hardware without TPM, allowing you to run whatever you want and patch the software that requires TPM such as the hackintosh Mac OS X. However, for the iPhone, you can only buy the hardware from Apple that always has TPM on it (or settle for a previous generation iPhone without TPM). The whole point of iPhone craze is that you want to buy iPhone made by Apple, and all the restrictions follow from that, including choice of carrier and applications you can run.
Do you have any means to verify that Firefox certificate is signed by someone you could trust? I could generate a certificate that looks like it's issued by Mozilla, and then sign a tempered copy of Firefox with it. Even if you can verify the mozilla.org certificate, the chain of trust ultimately leads to a root certificate that you must trust. Are you really sure that VeriSign or Thawte or other certificate issuing institutions cannot be compromised? I remember a past Slashdot story about one of the root issuer happily generating certificate for any domain name without verification.
If you have to use Apple's iPhone, your freedom is already automatically compromised, if not now, sooner or later.
The article seems to assume that bad programmers write slow but correct code, which is a big assumption. But the observation on cost also means that good programmers should focus on correctness rather than performance.
Just to illustrate how difficult it is to get correctness right, on page 56 of The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike---very highly regarded book and highly regarded authors---there is a hash table lookup function that is combined with insert to perform optional insertion when the key is not found in the table. It assumes that the value argument can be safely discarded if insertion is not performed. That assumption works fine with integers, but not with pointers to memory objects, file descriptors, or any handle to a resource. An inexperienced programmer trying to generalize int value to void *value will induce memory leak on behalf of the user of the function.
RIAA Caught Lying About Stopping Prosecution Tactic
Otherwise, when people see "RIAA Claim..." people stop reading. "RIAA Caught Lying..." gets people's attention.
That's not what Wikipedia says about Zen. Actually, what Wikipedia says is more like you discover Zen within yourself, so whatever the stupid neurons in your brain happen to make a random connection to want to believe in something, that becomes Zen.
Therefore, nobody knows what Zen is, and I'm free to make up whatever I want to say about Zen.
Gee, which idiot modded you offtopic? I side with you by saying again that C is the only language that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot very very easily, and it requires a lot of discipline to program.
Boys and girls, I hope TFA is not the way you learn about these world's religions or programming languages for that matter, because the author apparently is knowledgeable in neither religion nor programming languages.
I think I'll stop here, as the list grows more and more ridiculous.
We already have. It's called JPEG 2000, using wavelet as opposed to DCT to compress the image. This gets rid of the blocking effect prevalently observed in highly compressed JPEG files. However, I don't see JPEG 2000 making JPEG obsolete for various reasons.
However, there is still much research to be done on inter-frame compression used for motion pictures. I think we had hit a limit in intra-frame compression, so the focus for highly efficient video codec has been on synthesizing interpolated frames from neighboring frames. At this point, I think video codecs, even H.264, still stands a high chance to become obsolete within the next decade.
On your resume, try to highlight your significant personal projects and why you think they are cool. Your resume scores you interviews. And on your interview, I don't think impressing your interviewer is the goal, but you do need to show you're up to what you claim to be on the resume. Your personal projects can become an advantageous conversation piece during the interview. Try to have a good time with the interviewers because they may be having a long day as well.
According to this Bulk E-mailing Guidelines, only the university offices are permitted to bulk mail changes to university policies or procedures. Not the students.
However, their definition for bulk mail is any message sent to up to 20--30 people (large committee or work group) within 2 days. I wonder if she can send her announcement to 28 people at a time in 14 batches, or 28 days, in order to evade the criteria for bulk mail.
Another way to spread her message faster is to e-mail department secretaries and ask them to forward her message to professors in the department. This way, in the first 4 days, she'll be able to contact 60 departments. If some departments agree to do her a favor, that should reduce the number of professors she has to e-mail individually and reduce the risk of being accused of bulk mailing.
Or ask 14 friends to each forward her message to 28 professors at the same time. I think the accusation for bulk mailing will be much more difficult to hold for 14 people at once, each does not violate MSU bulk e-mail policy individually.
Let's be careful with the notion of virtual address space and page/swap file. Virtual address space is a hardware feature that allows any physical memory to be mapped to any address seen by the program in the granularity of pages (typically 4kb), and that part is almost free thanks to TLB. Virtual address space also allows an address to be backed by no physical memory, in which case the operating system will be notified if a program tries to access that address. If there was formerly a memory page swapped out to disk, the OS brings it in (possibly swapping another page out) and continues the program. If not, the OS aborts the program. Virtual address space and page/swap file are altogether called virtual memory management.
I could be mistaken, but I thought Windows requires each physical memory page to be backed by something on disk, either page file or memory mapped files (e.g. all executables and dlls are like that, which is why you can't remove executable files on disk when the program is still running). I think that's why the ask slashdot poster sees as much usage of "virtual memory" (here used to mean page file) as "physical memory."
What about the "ulimit" command?
It's not censorship but an editorial issue. I don't think it's the lack of meritocracy. The uncertainty in crowd rating is just an amplification that even professional critics can disagree randomly once the subject reaches a certain quality level.
The only minor fault I would possibly find if I were nitpicking in the current rating system is that it typically requires a basis of comparison to a pool of existing works. However, a subject can be so unfamiliar to the audience, for example a new genre of music or a new musical instrument, a new presentation of film, a new material or approach to sculpting, a new language for writing, or a new idea that doesn't relate well to existing intuition, that could not be rated in any capacity because of the lack of comparison. The consequence is that people are encouraged to refine existing ideas or practices rather than making completely new ones from scratch.
Such a bias in skewing motivation for creativity is probably inevitable but still useful. Otherwise, we would be left with a collection of work with crude, primitive, and unrefined practices.