Notice that a lot of these services, particularly Facebook and Google+, specifically say it's against the rules to have more than one account.
This could work out well - create a second account and hope they both get deleted, then you can be 100% sure you're starting from bare-metal / scorched-earth.
To make their idiocy even more evident, the SHORTEST interval that NTPD will hit a server is once per 16 seconds. So those once a second idiots were using software that itself was written by idiots.
So you don't think this was 1 NATted IP running 16+ servers behind it? As someone said above the default for some OSes is to hit the pool directly.
I think it's some of King's best work. It's worth reading at least one to see if you're into the series. The first one is harder to get into than the rest.
I read The Wastelands first. It reminded me a little of The Stand, but with more detail around Roland (main dude) and less background on what's going on in the world. It was interesting enough that I decided to go back and see what I'd missed.
Tried to read The Gunslinger and got bored after a little while - there are a few other characters, but it's mostly two dudes in the desert. The Drawing of the Three was more in the vein of Wastelands, and from there I blazed through each book as soon as it came out.
You may not realize it, but you've seen glimpses of the DT universe through most of King's books.
Your best bet is to find someone higher up who understands the problem or to whom you can explain the problem.
You eventually need to get to a C-level officer, something like CTO or COO who can actually mandate change. Somehow, in the places that I've worked I've been lucky enough to have CTOs that understand the concept of (and need for) security. They made a lot of changes that made sense to me (passwords must be changed more than once every 3 years, user data must not be stored on local machines, principles of least access, etc.) but other users didn't understand the business need behind them. "Yes, your department could hit all of its goals and produce its reports a day faster if everyone had access to everything, but if you use these rules then you take the extra day and you know it's right because it's auditable!"
Convince them that your business goals will be met faster / more auditably / with less risk if you implement certain policies. Risk is your best friend, although it sounds like your upper-level managers ignore it rather than mitigate it. It's going to take you a while, so get started now. Does your boss understand the problem? If not, can you explain and convince them that you know what you're talking about?
If you can't explain or justify your views on security, either learn some more or find a new job - it's not worth your while or the damage to your reputation from being associated with an insecure company if your title is Senior Security anything.
Disclaimer - I work for this place, so this probably sounds like a marketing pitch.
Plaxo Pulse is just about what you're looking for. We don't have vampires or zombies, and we're not about friend-whoring.
<marketing hooey> "It's meant to be a better way for you to stay in touch with the people you actually know and care about - your family, your real-world friends, and the people you know from business. Pulse makes it easy for you to see what they're creating and sharing online - their blogs, the photos they're uploading, their restaurant reviews, and so much more." </marketing hooey>
We're not a walled garden, so you can take your stuff with you when you want to (we sync and export, and publish RSS). We also let you use what you already use (blog, Flickr, Yelp, whatever), and just collect it together to share with whoever you like. You can also choose who you want to share with, so your friends won't see the karaoke pictures from your family reunion, and your parents won't see the pictures you take of your friends.
Use bootcfg to edit boot.ini to add in the safe mode switch - msconfig is your friend to find the switch
Add a registry entry to run your script on startup, probably HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce. You need something special in the entry name (maybe "*"? don't remember) to make it run in safe mode.
Modify your script to undo the boot.ini change and the registry change
Modify your script as per step 7-9
Reboot
Your script will run
Your script will run another command that spawns a child process then exits
The child process will wait for the window that says "you're booting into safe mode, click ok to contiune"
The child process will click the OK button, wait a minute to let everything settle down, then reboot.
Step 7 is important, since startup processes seem to run serially and the messagebox won't show up until the main process terminates. After that, the only problem is you have to click the "OK" button that warns you that you're booting into safe mode before you can reboot. I think I used AutoIt when I wrote a safemode script for cleaning spyware, it's bulky just for a "click a button" script, but it's insanely easy to use.
Honestly, how hard is it to sign up for a facebook account now. You don't even need a school email, just an email. Everyone could have access if they wanted to, in about 5 minutes.
I think you're missing the point.
If there were open standards for exchange, as TFA suggests, you shouldn't have to waste those 5 minutes for every stupid new OMGPonies social networking site that comes along.
Do people you know use only Facebook? or only MySpace? or only LinkedIn, Bebo, Blogspot, Xanga, LiveJournal, Friendster, Tagged, or only <insert "the next big thing" for social networking here>? Do you want to sign in to each of these to see what's happening with those people, or do you want to ignore someone if they're not on the same network that you're on? Probably not.
Assuming you want to participate in (any of) these networks, do you post the same content to each of your N different accounts? No. You should just be able to post it in one place, and have each of the networks that you want to point to that one place, and you should have control over what propagates where. You want to post that keg stand picture for your friends to see on Facebook, but you probably don't want your business contacts to see it. Right now, it's very hard to do that, but it really shouldn't be.
The main problem for me is that my outgoing mail currently goes through a server operated by my cable provider. I wonder, though, if I can get around this by setting From: to be from a different domain I have and Reply-To: to the the domain with the SPF records
You shouldn't have to do anything that fancy.
Go to the SPF wizard page, tell it what your mailservers are (even if they aren't your domain MX records) and it will tell you what to use. If your outgoing mail is set up as someguy@mycableprovider.com then you'll have to worry about them getting the records right, but if you're sending form someguy@mydomain.com you just have to worry about telling SPF which servers you send mail through.
Add SPF to your domain, and whatever subset of ISPs / mailservers that use it probably won't bug you. The only downside of using SPF is that you may have to change your DNS records if you want to use a new mailserver, but most people that I know only use one or two servers for outgoing mail for any one domain.
One DNS line to potentially stop a joejob against you - it's a no-brainer, even if you "have [your] dobuts". Go to the SPF Setup Wizard, fill in your servers and copy the IN TXT line.
See if it works, and proceed from there. If it doesn't, go back to the ISP and complain.
After taking a look at your linked website I noticed one thing. It's HORRIBLE. It's terribly designed with a laughably bad color scheme. It's nothing that any professional would ever put out or expect to get paid for. You can talk all you want about dreamweaver sucking, which, by the way, it doesn't, but after seeing that crap you put up it is very quickly dawning on me that you are not possessed of the skill or expertise to make that assertion.
Apparently you missed the comment at the top... understandable, since it is such a bad page. =)
12:32 PM 2006.02.12 Please don't be horrified by this page if you are looking for an example of my web design/programming skills.
This is my personal site, and I haven't changed its format in several years. It's still table-based even though I am now working with table-free CSS layouts.
Don't worry, your site will look MUCH better. This is just my playground!
(ps: this was a pretty cool layout, 3-column with spanned header, curved gfx for top/bottom, swanky animated GIF rollover menu, fancy-but-mostly-useless java-based navigation cube in the top-right)
or even
12:03 AM 2003.05.02 I just realized today that this is really ugly, i'm gonna have to change the fonts at least if not the entire layout.
Yet another example of why you should let a real DESIGNER make it look good and get a webmonkey to build it. I "designed" that page a long time ago, and haven't updated it since 2003 except to add those comments. It was originally written in January of 2001, and at that time it was pretty awesome. Lots of stuff on the web was "awesome" back then, and almost all of it sucks now.
Design and implementation are two different things.
Let a graphic artists/designer/whatever *design* the pages, but get a real web engineer to actually implement them. Do you think the editors of/. use DreamWeaver to dream up new and brilliant layouts? Would Google use FrontPage to make their front page? Does Yahoo even look at GoLive for their new content?
HELL NO
Any company worth its salt and with a web presence that matters to them will have some kind of artistic person draw a pretty picture and then LEAVE IT ALONE. From there a web engineer / code monkey / webmaster will actually implement the page as given to them, taking into account all the stuff that one has to account for on the web. Probably more than half the time if they are given HTML they will rewrite it.
Design tools give absolutely, utterly horrendous HTML as their output. Nearly any simple page you can imagine will end up as a bloated chunk of HTML with tons of cruft. Just getting a webmonkey to rewrite your HTML from one of those things could save you half of your bandwidth costs! Nested tables-within-tables are insane to manage, even when they're properly designed and not randomly slapped anywhere you need an extra 16px. Forget about CSS, XHTML or JavaScript/PHP/other dynamic content in a design tool, they're useless bastard-children at best, and are usually just ignored wholesale.
If you want to be respected as a web developer, you won't use WYSIWYG. You'll find yourself a decent syntax-hilighting text editor that handles Unix + MSDOS linebreaks and will work with UTF-8 content. Anything beyond that is gravy, but only to a point; if you have some magic one-click-homepage button in your editor, you probably have something that's trying too hard and will hold you back more than it will help.
Personally, I used notepad for a long, long time. At one point I switched to Dreamweaver because it did syntax hilighting, but it was just way too much to deal with and it kept trying to "fix" things that I knew weren't broken or which were "broken" in a particular and useful way. Nowadays I use either vim or emacs with a decent set of syntax rules - they do everything I need, and I can write scripts to interface with them if there's something extra I want to do.
In our office a few people have raved about TextMate, but apparently it's a Mac-only application. AFAIK it does the same thing - plain text editing with syntax coloring, and a couple of plugin-type scripts that make life just a little easier.
It depends entirely on how you're doing your QAES.
The standard 3DES process is 3DES-EDE which uses 2 keys, thus giving you 112 bits. ENCRYPT data with key1 DECRYPT output with key2 ENCRYPT output with key1
Since DES is symmetric, any paired combination of encrypt and decrypt will give you the same result. You can do E(D(data)) to get your result, or you can use D(E(data)) for the same thing. If you used the same key for key1 and key2, this would be the same as doing regular DES, and would just take 3x as long.
If you used three different keys for your 3DES instead, you would have the 168-bit key length. Thus, you can apply the same concept to 4AES, and depending on which way you do it you will end up with 256-, 512-, 768- or 1024-bit key strength.
It might be a better idea to use the CPU hours for something else, but in terms of either mathematics or CS this is pretty big.
Lenstra was even quoted in the article to counter your argument of no progress/learning - "We have more powerful computers, we have come up with better ways to map the algorithm onto the architecture, and we take better advantage of cache behavior." This is an incremental improvement that gives us benefits outside of just factorization, so I would say that the greater good may have been served. For the cost of some thousands of hours of computing time all future computations could be some percentage more efficient.
It's the equivalent of the DES challenges in the late 90s. People thought DES was pretty good, but computing power was getting to the point of making its key length obsolete. Eventually a team of CS geeks brute-forced DES in a few days, and then the EFF built a machine to crack it in a couple hours. It was finally obvious to EVERYONE that DES wasn't good enough anymore, so new techniques became standard and new research was encouraged to come up with better crypto algorithms. It's the same concept, "just by using methods we *knew* would work - but had never dedicated the resources to."
The best way to communicate something is in terms of how that someone understands things.
If you're talking to a business person, explain your solution / idea / objection in business terms. If you're talking to your doctor, explain it in medical terms. If you're talking to your 3-year-old, explain how SpongeBob would do whatever it is you're trying to do. If you don't really understand what you're trying to convey then you'll have a hard time with this, but if you do know what's going on it's not usually too hard to explain in someone else's frame of mind.
This is something I always try to put on my resume - Communicates complex ideas in understandable terms regardless of audience. If you really understand whatever it is that you're presenting you can re-frame it in terms that your target will also understand. The added bonus is that they'll appreciate that you didn't give them geeky technobabble when they asked you a "simple" question, and you can usually impress them with your knowledge AND let them feel smart for understanding at the same time.
It's not that they're necessarily bad, but that they pack in dozens of features that you don't necessarily need (potentially bloating the size of your page download by tens to hundreds of K) or even want.
This exact point has been raised about most of the frameworks out there, even beyond those listed in the article. I can't speak from experience for all of them, but I agree 100% for both Dojo and the YUI libraries. Even Yahoo's own developers realize that YUI is a little bloaty. Dojo has changed their roadmap to address this problem in particular, as well as most of your other main complaints about frameworks (gotchas, "standard" practices). They already have the framework split up in such a way that you can get some of the better parts without having to take the annoying ones - you build and/or dojo.require() only the pieces that you need. Currently there are some dependency chain problems that contribute to bloat, requiring any one widget generally will bump your Dojo size up 80-100k.
If you're doing a complex website, you'll probably be better off with a custom library for now.
This will always be true, but you can sometimes get the benefit of a framework without having to pay the full penalty of committing to it. Start with framework X and see how hard it is to build your app in The X Way (The Scriptaculous Way, The GWT Way, etc.) See how much it bloats your code and how many stupid workarounds there are for "features" that complicate your life. Try to use as little as possible, and make sure you alias it through your own library so you can swap to another framework if you get fed up with the existing one. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Eventually you'll find some combination that gives you that power-for-the-byte feel, where you get a lot of use out of certain functions without having to pay a huge size/complication penalty. Most of the time you'll find that you can write function Foo to do exactly what you need in 10% of the lines of code that the library does, and which will run faster as a result. This happens because, to a certain extent, the library HAS to be everything-to-everyone and has to handle all of the edge cases that your implementation doesn't.
For my current company, the answer was Dojo sans widgets. While originally we had used Dojo all-out and even thrown in 3 or 4 YUI libraries, we had to cut down our codebase just to make the download reasonable (hint: 1MB of JS will cause you problems. 2MB is practically pointless). Currently we use the transport and helper features of Dojo, and most everything else is rolled by hand. That 12K YUI library we were including for drag & drop support ended up being 12 lines of JS because we have a more tightly constrained problem than "allow anything to drag anywhere".
PS: It may be addressed in TFA (TLDR), but why did they evaluate old versions? GWT is at 1.3, YUI is at 2.2.0, Scriptaculous 1.7 came out in January and Dojo is currently at 0.4.2 - 0.4 was released in October!)
Seconded. At a large company I worked for, we used Altiris to do deployments, patches and upgrades. It really beat the previous method, which was to literally take the install CD around to wherever we were working. Altiris lets you do reporting on who has what (including software versions and patch levels), and their package interface is pretty kick-ass. I don't know if the flexibility is available on other packages, but with Altiris you can specify several steps in a deployment, like
Copy files to client
Based on OS+SP, copy some additional files
Run a script that will do some mojo to combine the additional files
Run an installer
Based on the installer results, run another package
Run another script that does reg patches to work around the problems that the package has
Chain packages together, so you can dump all your hotfixes with one click.
Better yet, since the job history shows up on the management screen, you can tell which systems have gotten which patches
There are also automatic package deployment processes, so a centralized office can instruct the remote Altiris servers to install patches on all of its clients at X time - that's great for the branches because they don't even have to worry about system-wide patches, they just happen.
In addition to the package deployment system, there are reporting and diagnostic tools too. There is even a "remote desktop" tool, so when an installation goes bad or returns some kind of error, you can remote into the box (and/or lock the user out while you do) and fix whatever is broken while the user is on the phone. A bunch of other tools came with the package too, RapidDeploy(snapshot and deploy app install diffs instead of waiting for the whole install process), profile management (remotely back up/migrate a user or system) and web-based ad-hoc reporting.
Since we were a large company we had a huge Altiris deployment(~80 remote servers for 1000s of clients), and we probably paid $$$$ for it. There are different packages in different sizes available (AFAIK), so you should be able to find a decent match for your company.
(wow, that really sounds like a sales pitch... i don't work for them, i just really liked the product)
I mean c'mon it's not hard to write a brilliant page that works everywhere. Look at how Gmail works. IE, FF and Opera all render it correctly. Even Konqueror does a good job but its javascript implementation is a bit lax.
This statement tells me you've never done web development.
IE, FF, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and all the other browsers out there ALL treat HTML, JS and CSS just differently enough that it's very hard to "write a brilliant page that works everywhere." Even different versions of the browsers will handle some situations differently. Sure, you can do some static HTML and some modest CSS and it'll look fine everywhere. But you can't create anything complicated or impressive without tripping over these browser bugs or quirks. Look at/. itself - the new CSS-and-Ajax style layout said "F*** You" to IE for a while, and even now doesn't work exactly the same way across both browsers. That's because it is hard to do.
Quirksmode documents a lot of these differences, and almost any time you try to make a "brilliant page" you will come across some weird quirk of some browser that will make you search the world trying to find out why something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Half of those are on Quirksmode. In the end, you'll find another way to do it that works equally badly in all browsers, but is at least consistent.
Also, the Drovak keyboard is biased against left-handers: "The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed." That's not entirely true... there are Dvorak variations for right- and left-handed only use. These would definitely bias toward one hand or the other, but potentially to the detriment of the other hand and/or overall speed. AFAIK these were developed for people who had lost limbs during <insert war here> and who had trouble with both standard QWERTY and the Dvorak layouts.
This seems like a much better suggestion than "get a projector". I want to build a video wall too, but the only 2 reasons to do so over a projector are "because" and high resolution.
Yes, I could buy a projector for a thousand or two, but that will still only give me 1.3MP, maybe 2MP if I get a really good one. For the price of a high-end projector I can probably get 4 LCD monitors with some moderate hardware to run them, and end up with a 5MP display that's much brighter and sharper than a projector can ever hope for. My plan is to spend the extra $$$ (probably a lot, but I'm not in a hurry) to get 12 screens running at 1280x1024 (4x3 grid) for 15MP total.
If I can get REALLY fancy and actually have a single program run across this behemoth, I could be playing my favorite FPS at 5120x3072. Or, if I get some better hardware I can run 2560x1920 on each to give me almost 59MP! Fragging never looked so good.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it too hard to add a link to the ANTVR Kickstarter page?
I don't think "co-opted" means what you think it means. I'm pretty sure Google just paid the operator for their service.
Notice that a lot of these services, particularly Facebook and Google+, specifically say it's against the rules to have more than one account.
This could work out well - create a second account and hope they both get deleted, then you can be 100% sure you're starting from bare-metal / scorched-earth.
So you don't think this was 1 NATted IP running 16+ servers behind it? As someone said above the default for some OSes is to hit the pool directly.
I think it's some of King's best work. It's worth reading at least one to see if you're into the series. The first one is harder to get into than the rest.
I read The Wastelands first. It reminded me a little of The Stand, but with more detail around Roland (main dude) and less background on what's going on in the world. It was interesting enough that I decided to go back and see what I'd missed.
Tried to read The Gunslinger and got bored after a little while - there are a few other characters, but it's mostly two dudes in the desert. The Drawing of the Three was more in the vein of Wastelands, and from there I blazed through each book as soon as it came out.
You may not realize it, but you've seen glimpses of the DT universe through most of King's books.
Your best bet is to find someone higher up who understands the problem or to whom you can explain the problem.
You eventually need to get to a C-level officer, something like CTO or COO who can actually mandate change. Somehow, in the places that I've worked I've been lucky enough to have CTOs that understand the concept of (and need for) security. They made a lot of changes that made sense to me (passwords must be changed more than once every 3 years, user data must not be stored on local machines, principles of least access, etc.) but other users didn't understand the business need behind them. "Yes, your department could hit all of its goals and produce its reports a day faster if everyone had access to everything, but if you use these rules then you take the extra day and you know it's right because it's auditable!"
Convince them that your business goals will be met faster / more auditably / with less risk if you implement certain policies. Risk is your best friend, although it sounds like your upper-level managers ignore it rather than mitigate it. It's going to take you a while, so get started now. Does your boss understand the problem? If not, can you explain and convince them that you know what you're talking about?
If you can't explain or justify your views on security, either learn some more or find a new job - it's not worth your while or the damage to your reputation from being associated with an insecure company if your title is Senior Security anything.
Disclaimer - I work for this place, so this probably sounds like a marketing pitch.
Plaxo Pulse is just about what you're looking for. We don't have vampires or zombies, and we're not about friend-whoring.
<marketing hooey>
"It's meant to be a better way for you to stay in touch with the people you actually know and care about - your family, your real-world friends, and the people you know from business. Pulse makes it easy for you to see what they're creating and sharing online - their blogs, the photos they're uploading, their restaurant reviews, and so much more."
</marketing hooey>
And the most important part: We are dedicated to the notion that your address book, your friends list, and your content belong to you, not to us."
We're not a walled garden, so you can take your stuff with you when you want to (we sync and export, and publish RSS). We also let you use what you already use (blog, Flickr, Yelp, whatever), and just collect it together to share with whoever you like. You can also choose who you want to share with, so your friends won't see the karaoke pictures from your family reunion, and your parents won't see the pictures you take of your friends.
For those who are too lazy to Google it, omphaloskepsis
- Use bootcfg to edit boot.ini to add in the safe mode switch - msconfig is your friend to find the switch
- Add a registry entry to run your script on startup, probably HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce. You need something special in the entry name (maybe "*"? don't remember) to make it run in safe mode.
- Modify your script to undo the boot.ini change and the registry change
- Modify your script as per step 7-9
- Reboot
- Your script will run
- Your script will run another command that spawns a child process then exits
- The child process will wait for the window that says "you're booting into safe mode, click ok to contiune"
- The child process will click the OK button, wait a minute to let everything settle down, then reboot.
Step 7 is important, since startup processes seem to run serially and the messagebox won't show up until the main process terminates. After that, the only problem is you have to click the "OK" button that warns you that you're booting into safe mode before you can reboot. I think I used AutoIt when I wrote a safemode script for cleaning spyware, it's bulky just for a "click a button" script, but it's insanely easy to use.Facebook being closed is not the reason it looks "good". MySpace being open is not the reason most pages look horrible.
open != user modifiable
If there were open standards for exchange, as TFA suggests, you shouldn't have to waste those 5 minutes for every stupid new OMGPonies social networking site that comes along.
Do people you know use only Facebook? or only MySpace? or only LinkedIn, Bebo, Blogspot, Xanga, LiveJournal, Friendster, Tagged, or only <insert "the next big thing" for social networking here>? Do you want to sign in to each of these to see what's happening with those people, or do you want to ignore someone if they're not on the same network that you're on? Probably not.
Assuming you want to participate in (any of) these networks, do you post the same content to each of your N different accounts? No. You should just be able to post it in one place, and have each of the networks that you want to point to that one place, and you should have control over what propagates where. You want to post that keg stand picture for your friends to see on Facebook, but you probably don't want your business contacts to see it. Right now, it's very hard to do that, but it really shouldn't be.
The cleaning analogy is perfectly apt!
If 100 people cleaned your house, they "wouldn't get shit done".
If 100 people cleaned Prof. Vishkin's house, they would be finished in about 3 minutes.
How this is better than Intel's 80-core processor remains to be seen. This "technology" looks like it's an overhyped version of GPGPU or PhysX.
Go to the SPF wizard page, tell it what your mailservers are (even if they aren't your domain MX records) and it will tell you what to use. If your outgoing mail is set up as someguy@mycableprovider.com then you'll have to worry about them getting the records right, but if you're sending form someguy@mydomain.com you just have to worry about telling SPF which servers you send mail through.
... but only if you use it.
Add SPF to your domain, and whatever subset of ISPs / mailservers that use it probably won't bug you. The only downside of using SPF is that you may have to change your DNS records if you want to use a new mailserver, but most people that I know only use one or two servers for outgoing mail for any one domain.
One DNS line to potentially stop a joejob against you - it's a no-brainer, even if you "have [your] dobuts". Go to the SPF Setup Wizard, fill in your servers and copy the IN TXT line.
See if it works, and proceed from there. If it doesn't, go back to the ISP and complain.
Apparently you missed the comment at the top... understandable, since it is such a bad page. =)
or even
Yet another example of why you should let a real DESIGNER make it look good and get a webmonkey to build it. I "designed" that page a long time ago, and haven't updated it since 2003 except to add those comments. It was originally written in January of 2001, and at that time it was pretty awesome. Lots of stuff on the web was "awesome" back then, and almost all of it sucks now.
Seconded, as strongly as I can...
/. use DreamWeaver to dream up new and brilliant layouts? Would Google use FrontPage to make their front page? Does Yahoo even look at GoLive for their new content?
Design and implementation are two different things.
Let a graphic artists/designer/whatever *design* the pages, but get a real web engineer to actually implement them. Do you think the editors of
HELL NO
Any company worth its salt and with a web presence that matters to them will have some kind of artistic person draw a pretty picture and then LEAVE IT ALONE. From there a web engineer / code monkey / webmaster will actually implement the page as given to them, taking into account all the stuff that one has to account for on the web. Probably more than half the time if they are given HTML they will rewrite it.
Design tools give absolutely, utterly horrendous HTML as their output. Nearly any simple page you can imagine will end up as a bloated chunk of HTML with tons of cruft. Just getting a webmonkey to rewrite your HTML from one of those things could save you half of your bandwidth costs! Nested tables-within-tables are insane to manage, even when they're properly designed and not randomly slapped anywhere you need an extra 16px. Forget about CSS, XHTML or JavaScript/PHP/other dynamic content in a design tool, they're useless bastard-children at best, and are usually just ignored wholesale.
If you want to be respected as a web developer, you won't use WYSIWYG. You'll find yourself a decent syntax-hilighting text editor that handles Unix + MSDOS linebreaks and will work with UTF-8 content. Anything beyond that is gravy, but only to a point; if you have some magic one-click-homepage button in your editor, you probably have something that's trying too hard and will hold you back more than it will help.
Personally, I used notepad for a long, long time. At one point I switched to Dreamweaver because it did syntax hilighting, but it was just way too much to deal with and it kept trying to "fix" things that I knew weren't broken or which were "broken" in a particular and useful way. Nowadays I use either vim or emacs with a decent set of syntax rules - they do everything I need, and I can write scripts to interface with them if there's something extra I want to do.
In our office a few people have raved about TextMate, but apparently it's a Mac-only application. AFAIK it does the same thing - plain text editing with syntax coloring, and a couple of plugin-type scripts that make life just a little easier.
Actually, yes, some do. It just means that the card is a store credit card, not a Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover.
Here are a list of coverage and general prefix info for the major bureaus, AFAIK anything outside of these can be used by a store credit card.
It depends entirely on how you're doing your QAES.
The standard 3DES process is 3DES-EDE which uses 2 keys, thus giving you 112 bits.
ENCRYPT data with key1
DECRYPT output with key2
ENCRYPT output with key1
Since DES is symmetric, any paired combination of encrypt and decrypt will give you the same result. You can do E(D(data)) to get your result, or you can use D(E(data)) for the same thing. If you used the same key for key1 and key2, this would be the same as doing regular DES, and would just take 3x as long.
If you used three different keys for your 3DES instead, you would have the 168-bit key length. Thus, you can apply the same concept to 4AES, and depending on which way you do it you will end up with 256-, 512-, 768- or 1024-bit key strength.
It might be a better idea to use the CPU hours for something else, but in terms of either mathematics or CS this is pretty big.
Lenstra was even quoted in the article to counter your argument of no progress/learning - "We have more powerful computers, we have come up with better ways to map the algorithm onto the architecture, and we take better advantage of cache behavior." This is an incremental improvement that gives us benefits outside of just factorization, so I would say that the greater good may have been served. For the cost of some thousands of hours of computing time all future computations could be some percentage more efficient.
It's the equivalent of the DES challenges in the late 90s. People thought DES was pretty good, but computing power was getting to the point of making its key length obsolete. Eventually a team of CS geeks brute-forced DES in a few days, and then the EFF built a machine to crack it in a couple hours. It was finally obvious to EVERYONE that DES wasn't good enough anymore, so new techniques became standard and new research was encouraged to come up with better crypto algorithms. It's the same concept, "just by using methods we *knew* would work - but had never dedicated the resources to."
The best way to communicate something is in terms of how that someone understands things.
If you're talking to a business person, explain your solution / idea / objection in business terms. If you're talking to your doctor, explain it in medical terms. If you're talking to your 3-year-old, explain how SpongeBob would do whatever it is you're trying to do. If you don't really understand what you're trying to convey then you'll have a hard time with this, but if you do know what's going on it's not usually too hard to explain in someone else's frame of mind.
This is something I always try to put on my resume - Communicates complex ideas in understandable terms regardless of audience. If you really understand whatever it is that you're presenting you can re-frame it in terms that your target will also understand. The added bonus is that they'll appreciate that you didn't give them geeky technobabble when they asked you a "simple" question, and you can usually impress them with your knowledge AND let them feel smart for understanding at the same time.
Eventually you'll find some combination that gives you that power-for-the-byte feel, where you get a lot of use out of certain functions without having to pay a huge size/complication penalty. Most of the time you'll find that you can write function Foo to do exactly what you need in 10% of the lines of code that the library does, and which will run faster as a result. This happens because, to a certain extent, the library HAS to be everything-to-everyone and has to handle all of the edge cases that your implementation doesn't.
For my current company, the answer was Dojo sans widgets. While originally we had used Dojo all-out and even thrown in 3 or 4 YUI libraries, we had to cut down our codebase just to make the download reasonable (hint: 1MB of JS will cause you problems. 2MB is practically pointless). Currently we use the transport and helper features of Dojo, and most everything else is rolled by hand. That 12K YUI library we were including for drag & drop support ended up being 12 lines of JS because we have a more tightly constrained problem than "allow anything to drag anywhere".
PS: It may be addressed in TFA (TLDR), but why did they evaluate old versions? GWT is at 1.3, YUI is at 2.2.0, Scriptaculous 1.7 came out in January and Dojo is currently at 0.4.2 - 0.4 was released in October!)
- Copy files to client
- Based on OS+SP, copy some additional files
- Run a script that will do some mojo to combine the additional files
- Run an installer
- Based on the installer results, run another package
- Run another script that does reg patches to work around the problems that the package has
- Chain packages together, so you can dump all your hotfixes with one click.
- Better yet, since the job history shows up on the management screen, you can tell which systems have gotten which patches
There are also automatic package deployment processes, so a centralized office can instruct the remote Altiris servers to install patches on all of its clients at X time - that's great for the branches because they don't even have to worry about system-wide patches, they just happen.In addition to the package deployment system, there are reporting and diagnostic tools too. There is even a "remote desktop" tool, so when an installation goes bad or returns some kind of error, you can remote into the box (and/or lock the user out while you do) and fix whatever is broken while the user is on the phone. A bunch of other tools came with the package too, RapidDeploy(snapshot and deploy app install diffs instead of waiting for the whole install process), profile management (remotely back up/migrate a user or system) and web-based ad-hoc reporting.
Since we were a large company we had a huge Altiris deployment(~80 remote servers for 1000s of clients), and we probably paid $$$$ for it. There are different packages in different sizes available (AFAIK), so you should be able to find a decent match for your company.
(wow, that really sounds like a sales pitch... i don't work for them, i just really liked the product)
This statement tells me you've never done web development.
IE, FF, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and all the other browsers out there ALL treat HTML, JS and CSS just differently enough that it's very hard to "write a brilliant page that works everywhere." Even different versions of the browsers will handle some situations differently. Sure, you can do some static HTML and some modest CSS and it'll look fine everywhere. But you can't create anything complicated or impressive without tripping over these browser bugs or quirks. Look at
Quirksmode documents a lot of these differences, and almost any time you try to make a "brilliant page" you will come across some weird quirk of some browser that will make you search the world trying to find out why something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Half of those are on Quirksmode. In the end, you'll find another way to do it that works equally badly in all browsers, but is at least consistent.
This seems like a much better suggestion than "get a projector". I want to build a video wall too, but the only 2 reasons to do so over a projector are "because" and high resolution.
Yes, I could buy a projector for a thousand or two, but that will still only give me 1.3MP, maybe 2MP if I get a really good one. For the price of a high-end projector I can probably get 4 LCD monitors with some moderate hardware to run them, and end up with a 5MP display that's much brighter and sharper than a projector can ever hope for. My plan is to spend the extra $$$ (probably a lot, but I'm not in a hurry) to get 12 screens running at 1280x1024 (4x3 grid) for 15MP total.
If I can get REALLY fancy and actually have a single program run across this behemoth, I could be playing my favorite FPS at 5120x3072. Or, if I get some better hardware I can run 2560x1920 on each to give me almost 59MP! Fragging never looked so good.