I made some cutouts of a 11.6" screen and 13.3" screen, and 11.6 is just too narrow. 13.3" buys you nearly an inch in portrait page width (5.69" vs. 6.52"). What I wouldn't give for 8.5".
I'm holding out for the Asus Taichi 31, because I like the 13.3" screen. Second choice would have to be the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro.
I really would like some data on the styli though. My Thinkpad tablet (Wacom) has degraded resolution near the edges, and with such narrow TV-screens, that leaves about 4" in the middle (portrait mode) that is writable. Do the new ones have this problem? What about the S-Pen and N-Trig styli?
The Surface Pro does. Here is a longer list of Windows 8 tablets with DPI > 150 and a stylus. I find 150 DPI to be the minimum if you want subscripts to be legible when placing a full page on screen (width maximized). Of course, the higher the better.
I've long been frustrate that Apple decided to forgo the stylus (and all others are playing copycat), and I'm really really frustrated that no one else sees the utility and use case in a computer that acts like paper (facepalm). I'll give Windows 8 a try for 5 or 10 minutes, but then Ubuntu and Xournal are going on mine. I'm also really frustrated that all these morons decided a 16:9 TV screen is the only way to make a computer screen: they're substantially narrower and taller than a Letter or A4 piece of paper. But at least they've finally returned to the desired DPI and stylus feature-point. The last time that happened was 2007 with the Thinkpad x61 tablet (with the SXGA+ screen upgrade).
Someone whose graphics card isn't up to the task of running a game at full native resolution?
For the myriad of responses that brought up this point: the answer is video card hardware scaling. E.g. add a flag _NET_WM_STATE_SCALING_ALLOWED which directs the WM to use hardware scaling from a fixed-size framebuffer, as is done by video players. Not only can you make it full screen, but you can resize it to any arbitrary shape and size (e.g. don't cover your widget bar, etc). Then the Window Manager decides what is "fullscreen". It could even make an app span more than one monitor when "fullscreen", or just one.
Who is still running a CRT? Who wants any program to change the resolution of their screen?
This strikes me as the wrong solution to the problem: A program should instead request the "current monitor's resolution" (because there can be more than one!) set its display area to that size, and then tell the window manager to "fullscreen" it by removing title bar and border decorations and moving it to (0,0) of that monitor. But NEVER EVER RESIZE MY MONITORS. Thank you. The window manager should always be superior to the app, and one should always be able to manage the window (task switch, move to another desktop, etc) using the window manager, regardless of what the app thinks it is doing.
So basically they're applying interleaved checksumming error correction (a la RAID5)? Good idea. What they didn't say is how much extra data was required to be sent by their solution. If they want to be able to recover 10% packet loss, presumably that means at least 10% more data sent, and there's still a failure point where the loss is greater than the checksum's size.
We've had these algorithms for decades. I've long been frustrated that checksums/ECC are not used at every single transmission and receiving point. Let's put this into the expansion bus, memory bus (ECC), and filesystem (btrfs/zfs), and of course, wifi and wired networks. Unfortunately the drive to the price floor resulted in everyone wanting to shave that 10% to make things cheaper. ECC was once commonly available in consumer hardware too, now you can only find it on ultra-specialized and ultra-pricey rackmount server hardware.
The 1980's assumption that the error is 1e-20, so can be ignored, is demonstrably false in nearly every computer application today. We need to (re-)start designing error correction into everything. Hey, why not use adaptive error correction, that increases the size of the checksum when the measured loss increases?
Why bother to remove the hard drives and graphics cards?
Because an assembled computer is generally not going to withstand stresses (dropping) very well. The box the case came in is not designed to handle more weight than the case itself, and if you put it in that box with all the cards/hdd/psu in it, it will way 5-10 times as much as the empty case. When it gets dropped (it will get dropped) things will come loose. Now you've got a loose video card rattling around in your case, bending and breaking connectors, and slamming into other things. In my case it was the PSU that came loose, due to some less-than-stellar mounting holes on the back of the case for it, as well as the CPU cooler which sticks way up off the motherboard. Mounting screws and aluminum panels were bent. Fortunately for me after re-mounting everything, everything still worked.
It's a good idea to disassemble everything as much as possible, and ship each part in something close to how it was shipped to you. When I have to do this again that's what I'll do. I think hard drives are probably okay to leave in the case, but RAM, CPUs coolers, and cards should be removed. Just a little force in the right direction will wrench them right off.
I think fsck is a non issue. I can't count the number of times fsck has swiss-cheesed my disk, filling/lost+found with thousands of numbered files. In no way is that kind of treatment of my data a "recovery". What btrfs had that is far more valuable than fsck is snapshots. I'll take a mountable, old snapshot over numbered inodes in/lost+found any day.
I've been using btrfs on two computers for about a year now. I'd say it's quite stable. I'm using it for/home as well as a data partition, with zlib compression on/home. The snapshot feature is amazing and should be used liberally. Early on I experienced some disk corruption (mostly due to rapidly switching kernel versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5), which was not a problem because there existed snapshots on the disk. The primary partition can be corrupted, but if you have an uncorrupted snapshot, you can mount it. So, it's a good idea to get in the habit of making regular snapshots. I've been doing it by hand, but a daily rotating snapshots would be a great idea for reliability. There are many cron jobs, shell scripts and whatnot to accomplish this (e.g. Autosnap). Furthermore there is apt-btrfs-snapshot which on Debian/Ubuntu systems will automatically snapshot whenever upgrading/installing a package. This basically takes care of changes in/usr (and you'll need a cron job for/home). The only real drawback I've encountered is that dpkg is very slow (likely due to my use of zlib compression). But dpkg's database access has been a snail for a long time and is dpkg's problem (and I hope someone looks into this soon, it's pissing me off -- zlib just exacerbates the problem). But since apt-get upgrade can run in the background while I'm working, it doesn't really bother me.
I'm also using RAID1 on all magnetic disks (plus one SSD not in a RAID configuration). After countless disk failures, I just don't trust magnetic disks any further than I can throw them. And, they are cheap enough that two instead of one is not a huge burden. In the last year, I have not had occasion to recover from a failure due to RAID1, but I have experimented with mounting one half of the RAID1, and it operates normally. There are a few tricks to re-sync the drives when its partner is re-added to the array, that one should be aware of. It's not fully automatic. One of my RAID1 arrays is over two LVM volumes, with the left half consisting of a single 3 TB disk, and the right half consisting of three disks concatenated into a single LVM. This makes it easier to add disks later. LVM and btrfs can both resize.
A couple things to be aware of: you cannot place a swap file on a btrfs partition. So use another filesystem, a full partition, or just buy more RAM (my preferred solution). You should not use a kernel version less than 3.5. There have been many fixes between 3.0 and 3.4, and you're asking for trouble if you use btrfs on a 3.0 or 3.2 kernel. Since I installed 3.5 kernels on all my machines, I have not had any btrfs-related problems. FWIW, I regularly have to reboot because ATI's shitty video driver causes a kernel panic, sometimes via a hard reset. I have yet to see any filesystem corruption due to this. And everyone should know how to use the Magic SysRq key in the event of kernel panics too. (Alt-SysRq- REIUSB should unmount, sync, and boot, leaving filesystems in a consistent state)
I highly recommend BTRFS at this point. I'm not sure the distributions are up to noob auto-installs, but if you like to do things yourself, it offers a lot of advantages over ext4.
All this will due is put some disclosure into EULA's, certainly buried way toward the back in small print, because everyone knows that users read EULA's before giving their consent, right? But the cat is out of the bag, and this won't cause vendors to stop trying to collect or sell your data. Android is already pretty good at this, by giving users a pretty detailed list of what information an app has access to at the time the app is installed. I've been alarmed at the number of apps that want permission to access information that they really don't need. I've also been alarmed at apps that want your Facebook login. I won't use apps like that, but I think I'm unique among users. Maybe I missed it, but I have not seen any kind of widespread user revolt against this kind of thing, just articles here and there vaguely implying misbehavior (like CarrierIQ). I haven't seen any comments on in the Android app store saying "you don't need that permission". The users don't care, so we're going to be railroaded out of the info no matter what we do, because someone else finds it profitable.
So instead of being employed, we're all expected to work, for free, in the hopes that we win a contest? I sure as hell hope this violates all kinds of labor laws.
The labor market has become the Hunger Games. We all lose.
The power connector itself is a massive point of failure, as they get full of dust, dirt, bent, static discharge, etc. My girlfriend has gone through 4 phones essentially because the microUSB power connector failed. I recently had to do some minor surgery to my Galaxy Nexus because the power connector was slightly bent, so that it always showed that it was charging even when not connected.
Good riddance to wired power. I'd gladly take my phone it out of my pocket and place it on a pad. I can't wait until such charging pads can be built into couch arms, tables, desks, etc. I'll never have to worry about whether my devices are charged. And some of them could be physically sealed from dust and water, substantially increasing their lifetime. (If you can forgo the headphone jack, microphone, etc -- like a on tablet)
I'm the guy telling you your transaction systems are totally fucking insecure, and who has lost money because of that fact. Insecure at $50 or $50,000 is still insecure and blocking transactions of any kind does not change that fact. The financial service providers need to move away from "secret pieces of information" (PINs, mother's maiden name, credit card numbers, CVV, billing address, etc) all of which are trivially easy to determine with google, facebook, or a camera phone. They need to move towards strong, end-to-end encryption, and cryptographic identification of clients and verification of transactions, some of which Bitcoin does.
The financial service providers are collapsing under an untenable system designed for a different era, and balancing out their risk with insurance and engineered inconvenience. Time to move into the 21st century.
All you have to do is file the right documentation with the IRS (on behalf of your clients). e.g. international transfers over $10k must be declared, but are not illegal.
So the IRS is preventing us from having secure transactions? I don't think so....and you think the IRS is going to say "oh all transactions are less than $1000? Well never mind then, we'll drop the money laundering charges...".
What's with these transaction limits?
You may have noticed our service limits transactions: each transaction has a dynamic limit calculated by our model but the limit will never exceed a 3 digit number (that is, the highest limit that will ever be possible per transaction for our service will be precisely 999). On top of this, we limit overall amount per-user within any single trading period to far below regulatory requirements - although we no doubt are turning away some users who are disappointed by this policy, it is in everyone's interest to maintain it.
If we allowed every user to transfer as much as they wanted it would cause several problems - first, it'd open us to unlimited risk if fraudulent transactions...
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken. Who are you to tell people not to buy cars, home repairs, startup business equipment, etc...
No, but I agree with everything he says!!! Everyone needs more statistics!
I'm flabbergasted every time I turn on the news just to hear the results of some poll (never quoted with appropriate errors), the true implication of which will be lost on the populous because they don't know enough statistics... It's not a matter only for programmers, it's for humans.
My field is physics, and physicists display exactly the same attitude as Zed Shaw: they think they're smart enough to make up or figure out the statistics along the way. Unfortunately for them, this is often true, and I think physicists even contribute meaningfully to the statistics literature. But even physicists would be better off with more statistics courses and less "winging it". My biggest pet peeve: why do particle physicists decide on 5 sigma for the "discovery" of a particle (e.g. the Higgs at CERN a few weeks ago). Most physicists cannot answer that question, or answer it incorrectly. Every single media article on the topic addresses that question incorrectly. The correct answer is that we don't know the probability distribution out on the tails, and 5 times the 1-sigma error is taken as a community "rule of thumb". It is not a 5-sigma gaussian probability (5.7e-7 "probability of being wrong" -- which is what everyone quotes).
A reasonable perspective, I think, but your knowledge of statistics will be very poor without calculus. The PDF and CDF are related by an integral. The moments of a distribution are integrals over the PDF, as is the "expected value" of a function. Bayesian prediction requires integrals. Just a few examples.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I got myself thinking...in the future there really will be only one kind of job. We've been slowly replaced by machines, robots, and algorithms. The era of 3d printing and personal manufacturing is coming. Once that is here, and the chaos of software we have now has settled down a bit, there will be no real labor or wire-plugging jobs available. I can see the analogous Slashdot question from 2032: "How much programming do I actually need? I already know how to use the Banking App, and the Driving Tool, the Shopping App, and I'm proficient with the Election App. So why would I want to know how to create any of those?" And the answer is that all jobs for which knowledge is not required have been replaced by machines or software. So kids, you've only got one real asset you'll be able to sell to an employer 20-50 years from now: it's in your head and the more you dump into it, the more valuable it will be. I seriously worry that our education is just creating human cogs for the Great Wheel. We will eventually have to transition to a world where creativity and divergent thinking are not only valuable, but the only employable skills (because computers still won't be able to do them). The way you do that is to have as much knowledge as possible, so you can draw connections among your knowledge. Outside of that one can also be an entrepreneur and creating new wheels, recruiting the necessary cogs. But the discussion that surrounds education is always one of how to make better cogs rather than how to make new kinds of wheels. Institutional education is an assembly line for cogs. The more you diverge from the requirements of your chosen cog-type, the more new connections you'll be able to make, and the more likely you'll be able to catapult over other cogs, or become a wheel-maker.
The knowledge gained in unusual math courses is applied rarely, for most people. So rarely that many would (and do) argue it is not necessary. But where it is applied, it has a drastic, career-making impact, and you want to be the one who figures out where and when to apply which piece of math. Whether it's how to shorten the queue at your restaurant, keeping cars from colliding, decreasing the miles flown by an airline's planes, writing an accurate battery monitor, or figuring out when to buy a stock, there's one right answer and 1000 wrong answers that will be tried by those with insufficient knowledge of Math. The right answer will save a life or earn a fortune. The wrong answers may not lose life or lose fortunes, and someone might pay you to do a mediocre job, but I would not call that a very good measure of success.
You've just reduced computer science to monkeys plugging the right wire into the right socket. 1,000,000 such monkeys can reproduce the collected works of Kernighan and Richie.
Without math you'll be unable to:
Understand big-O algorithm analysis
Analyze the output of a profiler
Understand any encryption algorithm
Work on any data analysis (every application has some element of statistics -- even if it's in the app's own internal call graph)
If you cannot do those things, I wouldn't call you a programmer, I'd call you a monkey.
This ongoing discussion about lack of math is ludicrous. Math is one of those things where if you don't know it, you can't see what it's for, and if you know it, you can't imagine a world without it. You can always argue you don't need knowledge, and if you're nothing but a device for turning food into poop then that's true, but those with knowledge will rule you. EVERY single thing in the world comes down to math. The monkeys don't know that, and they shouldn't program computers. Every single job you can think of can be improved by judicious application of a little math in the right places, and those who can will get ahead.
To be specific, take combinatorics, and as much statistics as you can get your hands on. That in my opinion is the bare minimum for life as a human being. Then you can understand poker odds, political polls and elections, and you'll know enough to not blow your money on lottery tickets. For programming or any scientific/engineering field, you'll also need linear algebra and calculus. If you're smart enough to realize that you don't live in 1-dimensional world, continue with vector calculus and complex analysis, and laugh as everyone around you tries to do linear regression on everything they can find. One or two more courses out of interest and you'll have a math major.
I don't see your point. What does that have to do with TFA? And why would I ever want to identify myself on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there are two entities that need identity: banks and the government. All others don't need it, and induce liability, crime, and fraud by retaining identity information. With fraudulent identity information, one can perpetrate new fraudulent transactions with third parties unrelated to the source of the leaked identity information. With fraudulent authentication information, you can only perpetrate fraud to the extent that the authentication allows (e.g. a slightly better auth-only system would have allowed TFA's access to google, but not Amazon or Apple). What an online business might want is to authenticate that you are the same person that performed some transaction. e.g. so you can change shipping address, customer service request, etc. Still doesn't require identity. If those authentication credentials are lost/stolen, everyone currently falls back on identity (as if they actually had a secure means to identify and trust you). That's why these social engineering attacks fall back on identity -- it's easier to fake. Never in any transaction is any measure of "trust" actually established. In most contexts, both authentication credentials and identifying information can be stolen (though it is not technically necessary for this to be the case with strong encryption and a web of trust -- as you point out). So I contend there is never any trust in the cryptographic sense, and we are all fools for trusting insecure authentication and identification protocols. We shouldn't have to do that. These little "secret bits of information" used for identification are not actually secret.
Slashdot Mirror
I made some cutouts of a 11.6" screen and 13.3" screen, and 11.6 is just too narrow. 13.3" buys you nearly an inch in portrait page width (5.69" vs. 6.52"). What I wouldn't give for 8.5".
P.S. Original source of that tablet+stylus table.
One more try to get this link right.
I'm holding out for the Asus Taichi 31, because I like the 13.3" screen. Second choice would have to be the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro.
I really would like some data on the styli though. My Thinkpad tablet (Wacom) has degraded resolution near the edges, and with such narrow TV-screens, that leaves about 4" in the middle (portrait mode) that is writable. Do the new ones have this problem? What about the S-Pen and N-Trig styli?
Well that didn't work...try this link (these tables are not mine).
The Surface Pro does. Here is a longer list of Windows 8 tablets with DPI > 150 and a stylus. I find 150 DPI to be the minimum if you want subscripts to be legible when placing a full page on screen (width maximized). Of course, the higher the better.
I've long been frustrate that Apple decided to forgo the stylus (and all others are playing copycat), and I'm really really frustrated that no one else sees the utility and use case in a computer that acts like paper (facepalm). I'll give Windows 8 a try for 5 or 10 minutes, but then Ubuntu and Xournal are going on mine. I'm also really frustrated that all these morons decided a 16:9 TV screen is the only way to make a computer screen: they're substantially narrower and taller than a Letter or A4 piece of paper. But at least they've finally returned to the desired DPI and stylus feature-point. The last time that happened was 2007 with the Thinkpad x61 tablet (with the SXGA+ screen upgrade).
For the myriad of responses that brought up this point: the answer is video card hardware scaling. E.g. add a flag _NET_WM_STATE_SCALING_ALLOWED which directs the WM to use hardware scaling from a fixed-size framebuffer, as is done by video players. Not only can you make it full screen, but you can resize it to any arbitrary shape and size (e.g. don't cover your widget bar, etc). Then the Window Manager decides what is "fullscreen". It could even make an app span more than one monitor when "fullscreen", or just one.
Who is still running a CRT? Who wants any program to change the resolution of their screen?
This strikes me as the wrong solution to the problem: A program should instead request the "current monitor's resolution" (because there can be more than one!) set its display area to that size, and then tell the window manager to "fullscreen" it by removing title bar and border decorations and moving it to (0,0) of that monitor. But NEVER EVER RESIZE MY MONITORS. Thank you. The window manager should always be superior to the app, and one should always be able to manage the window (task switch, move to another desktop, etc) using the window manager, regardless of what the app thinks it is doing.
So basically they're applying interleaved checksumming error correction (a la RAID5)? Good idea. What they didn't say is how much extra data was required to be sent by their solution. If they want to be able to recover 10% packet loss, presumably that means at least 10% more data sent, and there's still a failure point where the loss is greater than the checksum's size.
We've had these algorithms for decades. I've long been frustrated that checksums/ECC are not used at every single transmission and receiving point. Let's put this into the expansion bus, memory bus (ECC), and filesystem (btrfs/zfs), and of course, wifi and wired networks. Unfortunately the drive to the price floor resulted in everyone wanting to shave that 10% to make things cheaper. ECC was once commonly available in consumer hardware too, now you can only find it on ultra-specialized and ultra-pricey rackmount server hardware.
The 1980's assumption that the error is 1e-20, so can be ignored, is demonstrably false in nearly every computer application today. We need to (re-)start designing error correction into everything. Hey, why not use adaptive error correction, that increases the size of the checksum when the measured loss increases?
Because an assembled computer is generally not going to withstand stresses (dropping) very well. The box the case came in is not designed to handle more weight than the case itself, and if you put it in that box with all the cards/hdd/psu in it, it will way 5-10 times as much as the empty case. When it gets dropped (it will get dropped) things will come loose. Now you've got a loose video card rattling around in your case, bending and breaking connectors, and slamming into other things. In my case it was the PSU that came loose, due to some less-than-stellar mounting holes on the back of the case for it, as well as the CPU cooler which sticks way up off the motherboard. Mounting screws and aluminum panels were bent. Fortunately for me after re-mounting everything, everything still worked.
It's a good idea to disassemble everything as much as possible, and ship each part in something close to how it was shipped to you. When I have to do this again that's what I'll do. I think hard drives are probably okay to leave in the case, but RAM, CPUs coolers, and cards should be removed. Just a little force in the right direction will wrench them right off.
It will get dropped.
Good catch! Sadly, in fact I have been doing U before S. I even knew what both of them did!!!!
Well, score one more for btrfs, that my idiocy did not result in any disk corruption.
I think fsck is a non issue. I can't count the number of times fsck has swiss-cheesed my disk, filling /lost+found with thousands of numbered files. In no way is that kind of treatment of my data a "recovery". What btrfs had that is far more valuable than fsck is snapshots. I'll take a mountable, old snapshot over numbered inodes in /lost+found any day.
I've been using btrfs on two computers for about a year now. I'd say it's quite stable. I'm using it for /home as well as a data partition, with zlib compression on /home. The snapshot feature is amazing and should be used liberally. Early on I experienced some disk corruption (mostly due to rapidly switching kernel versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5), which was not a problem because there existed snapshots on the disk. The primary partition can be corrupted, but if you have an uncorrupted snapshot, you can mount it. So, it's a good idea to get in the habit of making regular snapshots. I've been doing it by hand, but a daily rotating snapshots would be a great idea for reliability. There are many cron jobs, shell scripts and whatnot to accomplish this (e.g. Autosnap). Furthermore there is apt-btrfs-snapshot which on Debian/Ubuntu systems will automatically snapshot whenever upgrading/installing a package. This basically takes care of changes in /usr (and you'll need a cron job for /home). The only real drawback I've encountered is that dpkg is very slow (likely due to my use of zlib compression). But dpkg's database access has been a snail for a long time and is dpkg's problem (and I hope someone looks into this soon, it's pissing me off -- zlib just exacerbates the problem). But since apt-get upgrade can run in the background while I'm working, it doesn't really bother me.
I'm also using RAID1 on all magnetic disks (plus one SSD not in a RAID configuration). After countless disk failures, I just don't trust magnetic disks any further than I can throw them. And, they are cheap enough that two instead of one is not a huge burden. In the last year, I have not had occasion to recover from a failure due to RAID1, but I have experimented with mounting one half of the RAID1, and it operates normally. There are a few tricks to re-sync the drives when its partner is re-added to the array, that one should be aware of. It's not fully automatic. One of my RAID1 arrays is over two LVM volumes, with the left half consisting of a single 3 TB disk, and the right half consisting of three disks concatenated into a single LVM. This makes it easier to add disks later. LVM and btrfs can both resize.
A couple things to be aware of: you cannot place a swap file on a btrfs partition. So use another filesystem, a full partition, or just buy more RAM (my preferred solution). You should not use a kernel version less than 3.5. There have been many fixes between 3.0 and 3.4, and you're asking for trouble if you use btrfs on a 3.0 or 3.2 kernel. Since I installed 3.5 kernels on all my machines, I have not had any btrfs-related problems. FWIW, I regularly have to reboot because ATI's shitty video driver causes a kernel panic, sometimes via a hard reset. I have yet to see any filesystem corruption due to this. And everyone should know how to use the Magic SysRq key in the event of kernel panics too. (Alt-SysRq- REIUSB should unmount, sync, and boot, leaving filesystems in a consistent state)
I highly recommend BTRFS at this point. I'm not sure the distributions are up to noob auto-installs, but if you like to do things yourself, it offers a lot of advantages over ext4.
Are you telling me that CM will let you install apps that need e.g. "phone state and identity" but will feed them false information?
If so, I'm definitely switching to CM.
All this will due is put some disclosure into EULA's, certainly buried way toward the back in small print, because everyone knows that users read EULA's before giving their consent, right? But the cat is out of the bag, and this won't cause vendors to stop trying to collect or sell your data. Android is already pretty good at this, by giving users a pretty detailed list of what information an app has access to at the time the app is installed. I've been alarmed at the number of apps that want permission to access information that they really don't need. I've also been alarmed at apps that want your Facebook login. I won't use apps like that, but I think I'm unique among users. Maybe I missed it, but I have not seen any kind of widespread user revolt against this kind of thing, just articles here and there vaguely implying misbehavior (like CarrierIQ). I haven't seen any comments on in the Android app store saying "you don't need that permission". The users don't care, so we're going to be railroaded out of the info no matter what we do, because someone else finds it profitable.
So instead of being employed, we're all expected to work, for free, in the hopes that we win a contest? I sure as hell hope this violates all kinds of labor laws.
The labor market has become the Hunger Games. We all lose.
The power connector itself is a massive point of failure, as they get full of dust, dirt, bent, static discharge, etc. My girlfriend has gone through 4 phones essentially because the microUSB power connector failed. I recently had to do some minor surgery to my Galaxy Nexus because the power connector was slightly bent, so that it always showed that it was charging even when not connected.
Good riddance to wired power. I'd gladly take my phone it out of my pocket and place it on a pad. I can't wait until such charging pads can be built into couch arms, tables, desks, etc. I'll never have to worry about whether my devices are charged. And some of them could be physically sealed from dust and water, substantially increasing their lifetime. (If you can forgo the headphone jack, microphone, etc -- like a on tablet)
I'm the guy telling you your transaction systems are totally fucking insecure, and who has lost money because of that fact. Insecure at $50 or $50,000 is still insecure and blocking transactions of any kind does not change that fact. The financial service providers need to move away from "secret pieces of information" (PINs, mother's maiden name, credit card numbers, CVV, billing address, etc) all of which are trivially easy to determine with google, facebook, or a camera phone. They need to move towards strong, end-to-end encryption, and cryptographic identification of clients and verification of transactions, some of which Bitcoin does.
The financial service providers are collapsing under an untenable system designed for a different era, and balancing out their risk with insurance and engineered inconvenience. Time to move into the 21st century.
All you have to do is file the right documentation with the IRS (on behalf of your clients). e.g. international transfers over $10k must be declared, but are not illegal.
So the IRS is preventing us from having secure transactions? I don't think so....and you think the IRS is going to say "oh all transactions are less than $1000? Well never mind then, we'll drop the money laundering charges...".
From their FAQ:
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken. Who are you to tell people not to buy cars, home repairs, startup business equipment, etc...
No, but I agree with everything he says!!! Everyone needs more statistics!
I'm flabbergasted every time I turn on the news just to hear the results of some poll (never quoted with appropriate errors), the true implication of which will be lost on the populous because they don't know enough statistics... It's not a matter only for programmers, it's for humans.
My field is physics, and physicists display exactly the same attitude as Zed Shaw: they think they're smart enough to make up or figure out the statistics along the way. Unfortunately for them, this is often true, and I think physicists even contribute meaningfully to the statistics literature. But even physicists would be better off with more statistics courses and less "winging it". My biggest pet peeve: why do particle physicists decide on 5 sigma for the "discovery" of a particle (e.g. the Higgs at CERN a few weeks ago). Most physicists cannot answer that question, or answer it incorrectly. Every single media article on the topic addresses that question incorrectly. The correct answer is that we don't know the probability distribution out on the tails, and 5 times the 1-sigma error is taken as a community "rule of thumb". It is not a 5-sigma gaussian probability (5.7e-7 "probability of being wrong" -- which is what everyone quotes).
A reasonable perspective, I think, but your knowledge of statistics will be very poor without calculus. The PDF and CDF are related by an integral. The moments of a distribution are integrals over the PDF, as is the "expected value" of a function. Bayesian prediction requires integrals. Just a few examples.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I got myself thinking...in the future there really will be only one kind of job. We've been slowly replaced by machines, robots, and algorithms. The era of 3d printing and personal manufacturing is coming. Once that is here, and the chaos of software we have now has settled down a bit, there will be no real labor or wire-plugging jobs available. I can see the analogous Slashdot question from 2032: "How much programming do I actually need? I already know how to use the Banking App, and the Driving Tool, the Shopping App, and I'm proficient with the Election App. So why would I want to know how to create any of those?" And the answer is that all jobs for which knowledge is not required have been replaced by machines or software. So kids, you've only got one real asset you'll be able to sell to an employer 20-50 years from now: it's in your head and the more you dump into it, the more valuable it will be. I seriously worry that our education is just creating human cogs for the Great Wheel. We will eventually have to transition to a world where creativity and divergent thinking are not only valuable, but the only employable skills (because computers still won't be able to do them). The way you do that is to have as much knowledge as possible, so you can draw connections among your knowledge. Outside of that one can also be an entrepreneur and creating new wheels, recruiting the necessary cogs. But the discussion that surrounds education is always one of how to make better cogs rather than how to make new kinds of wheels. Institutional education is an assembly line for cogs. The more you diverge from the requirements of your chosen cog-type, the more new connections you'll be able to make, and the more likely you'll be able to catapult over other cogs, or become a wheel-maker.
The knowledge gained in unusual math courses is applied rarely, for most people. So rarely that many would (and do) argue it is not necessary. But where it is applied, it has a drastic, career-making impact, and you want to be the one who figures out where and when to apply which piece of math. Whether it's how to shorten the queue at your restaurant, keeping cars from colliding, decreasing the miles flown by an airline's planes, writing an accurate battery monitor, or figuring out when to buy a stock, there's one right answer and 1000 wrong answers that will be tried by those with insufficient knowledge of Math. The right answer will save a life or earn a fortune. The wrong answers may not lose life or lose fortunes, and someone might pay you to do a mediocre job, but I would not call that a very good measure of success.
You've just reduced computer science to monkeys plugging the right wire into the right socket. 1,000,000 such monkeys can reproduce the collected works of Kernighan and Richie.
Without math you'll be unable to:
If you cannot do those things, I wouldn't call you a programmer, I'd call you a monkey.
This ongoing discussion about lack of math is ludicrous. Math is one of those things where if you don't know it, you can't see what it's for, and if you know it, you can't imagine a world without it. You can always argue you don't need knowledge, and if you're nothing but a device for turning food into poop then that's true, but those with knowledge will rule you. EVERY single thing in the world comes down to math. The monkeys don't know that, and they shouldn't program computers. Every single job you can think of can be improved by judicious application of a little math in the right places, and those who can will get ahead.
To be specific, take combinatorics, and as much statistics as you can get your hands on. That in my opinion is the bare minimum for life as a human being. Then you can understand poker odds, political polls and elections, and you'll know enough to not blow your money on lottery tickets. For programming or any scientific/engineering field, you'll also need linear algebra and calculus. If you're smart enough to realize that you don't live in 1-dimensional world, continue with vector calculus and complex analysis, and laugh as everyone around you tries to do linear regression on everything they can find. One or two more courses out of interest and you'll have a math major.
I don't see your point. What does that have to do with TFA? And why would I ever want to identify myself on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there are two entities that need identity: banks and the government. All others don't need it, and induce liability, crime, and fraud by retaining identity information. With fraudulent identity information, one can perpetrate new fraudulent transactions with third parties unrelated to the source of the leaked identity information. With fraudulent authentication information, you can only perpetrate fraud to the extent that the authentication allows (e.g. a slightly better auth-only system would have allowed TFA's access to google, but not Amazon or Apple). What an online business might want is to authenticate that you are the same person that performed some transaction. e.g. so you can change shipping address, customer service request, etc. Still doesn't require identity. If those authentication credentials are lost/stolen, everyone currently falls back on identity (as if they actually had a secure means to identify and trust you). That's why these social engineering attacks fall back on identity -- it's easier to fake. Never in any transaction is any measure of "trust" actually established. In most contexts, both authentication credentials and identifying information can be stolen (though it is not technically necessary for this to be the case with strong encryption and a web of trust -- as you point out). So I contend there is never any trust in the cryptographic sense, and we are all fools for trusting insecure authentication and identification protocols. We shouldn't have to do that. These little "secret bits of information" used for identification are not actually secret.