Your post makes absolute sense. I have at least 500 pictures of my son saved on my computer/backed up. I only printed a few of them to create a calendar that I sent to my parents. (not have albums upon albums saved up like my parents did).
I mainly shop online, meaning I don't drive my car to get to "the mall" and waste gas (and dodge all the flyers they try to hand out)!
Two weak examples, but I'm pretty sure you can easily count the things done with computers vs. without, and computers will be far ahead.
Computers save energy "as it is", when they lower the power needed to run a server/desktop or a datacenter, then it's "that much better".If computers use a tree a day as it is (exaggeration), we'll still be ahead from having no computers at all!
Thanks for the post, it's refreshing to see something like this on Slashdot:)
I assume these 150 commands are specific to Windows' internal undocumented APIs that only Microsoft would be aware of. I'm thinking they're more along the lines of:
cmd cd \ dir/s > e:\Files_List.txt* copy %Application Data%..IE..History..cache... etc.
Your logic is sorta flawed. If they did not need to patch wounds they would not need to create a better solution to stopping blood flow thus the research would never happen. I beg to differ, war is not the only way to get a wound or to start bleeding.
We have invented *tons* of useless and useful things without the help of DOD or for war purposes.
Anyway, seeing the moderation my comment got and the responses I think my post was lost on this whole discussion so might as well stop replying.
No offense, but if my views were widely popular to be that annoying, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have elected Bush twice nor would we be in war right now.
I'm not trying to start a political war here, it's already happening everywhere else. Just like I said, food for thought*.
It's great that a lot of DOD investments make it to civilian use at some point (and I think this one will), but I think if we had a bigger research budget elsewhere we would have discovered/invented things without losing lives.
It's probably naive to think that we don't need a defense budget (which is not what I'm advocating), but maybe if we focused more on research and science to cure diseases etc. and not on trying to be better at killing people, the world might just be a better place.
A similar conclusion can be drawn from the article:
The booths are filled with broad product claims, meaningless security platitudes and unintelligible marketing literature. You could walk into a booth, listen to a five-minute sales pitch by a marketing type, and still not know what the company does. Even seasoned security professionals are confused. This is the state of security products for the most part nowadays, hoax products and snake oil salesmen "IT'S 2009 READY!!!1!".
Now, I do agree with you that security should lie at the foundation of a design, but security also works by constructing layers of defense. No matter how good your design/implementation is, software is very complicated and someone will slip somewhere.
Unless you write your own OS, design your hardware and write its firmware, then write your application on top of all that: You _will_ be depending on someone somewhere to do it, and they may (or may not) mess something up.
The more layers of security you add (hardware firewall, anti-virus, etc.), the more secure you will be at the end.
Start a myth, get other people to believe such a myth, then get congress to force people to give them more money to pay for the myth From his BIO:
Mr. Cicconi also served in the White House under two presidents, including two years as deputy chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush and four years as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan I'd say he has the experience for it:)
I liked this one:
"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today." I'll be waiting for my 1 Terabits per second connection any day now, and even then I don't think 20 households would generate more traffic than the infrastructure we have today.
Given how impressive his title is I'd say that last one is most likely... From the article:
Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T Doesn't sound like a techie to me, of course he should know better and at least consult with someone before making absurd statements like this, but oh well, what do you say..
I'd like to say it can't get any more ludicrous than this, but I bet it can From his speech:
That is not to suggest that we've been standing idly by before now. Yesterday, for example, I met with entertainment industry leaders in Los Angeles, where I participated in a roundtable discussion focused on IP issues and enforcement strategies. Earlier this morning, I had a similar roundtable discussion with leaders from Silicon Valley. Theories about how the "roundtable" discussions went are left as an exercise for your 2 years old...
PowerShell is based on.NET, the command line will go something like this Well yea, Microsoft will have to do that for you. You use GetInstallFile though which is the end product or whatever.
One of the coolest features I read about PowerShell (not sure if it's still there, I stopped following the whole thing a while ago) is that you can expose parts (all?) of your classes' methods and properties to the command line interface with no additional programming on your part (except maybe indicating that they're command-line accessible).
I don't have a concrete example of it, but it's something along the lines of: class getInstallFile {
public string name;
public int repo;
public int getInstallFile() {// Do stuff..
} }
Then on the command line someone would call getInstallFile.exe --name='xyz' --repo='2', or something to that effect.
(I don't have any.NET experience, so I don't know if the above is correct, but it looks like it). You mixed C# and VB.NET syntax. VB.NET doesn't do curly braces or "using" and C# doesn't do Dim.. As. It's an example though so who cares (I skipped everything on mine);)
Imagine you have to buy car rental package each month.. snip.. Why *wouldn't* you let other people use the extra miles you've already purchased and are going to just throw away? Because they can commit a crime with the rental car, and the government will come after "you".
Just like if someone downloads kiddie porn or hosts a torrent of the latest hot single by $artist_name using your open wireless connection, the government/RIAA will come after you.
That's one of the reasons my wireless network is locked down.
- Skype threatens AT&T's international calling business on the iPhone - Firefox/etc. "steals" Apple's search revenue from Google/MSN/whatever (When you use Firefox or other browsers and search using the search box built-in the browser they [browser makers] get a cut on advertisement revenue from the search provider. Same thing goes for the nicely branded default home page that is built in).
At least that's my theory.
That being said, I believe it's simply all about the money.
From my fragile understanding of OpenID, is might actually be a Good Thing(TM).
I believe it works like this: 1) You have your own server/domain name (or rely on a 3rd party) 2) You setup Open ID on it, and create accounts like me@mydomain.com 3) You visit site A which utilizes Open ID, and login 4) Site A calls your server with the data/token over encrypted connection asking if it's you 5) Your server responds with "OK, go ahead" 6) Site A fullfils your request (give you candy, or whatever it is you were looking for)
This is a very brief, off-the-top / what I can remember post.
The idea of decentralized authentication network sounds pretty good actually, there are other "cool" points to Open ID, but I'm on my lunch break and I'm short on time.
I'd rather have the warm body of my wife next to me... oh wait, I must be new here. Never mind. Actually you must be a newlywed!
I have a theory that the distance between married people in bed grows exponentially with the number of years they were married. So right around 10 years you're actually sleeping in different rooms!
The big change in 6.0 will be the availability of MySQL's storage engine, Falcon. The most popular storage engine for MySQL has historically been InnoDB, but two years ago Oracle acquired InnoDB's developer, Innobase. Oracle continued to license the software to MySQL, but MySQL wanted an alternative.
Falcon will do crash recovery and roll-back operations faster than InnoDB because they are done from main memory, Schumacher said, but some InnoDB features, like foreign key support and full-text indexing, won't be supported until MySQL 6.1.
MySQL's default engine (since 5.0?) is innoDB, which supports foreign keys just fine (I have a database full of them). The article was talking about the new engine coming in MySQL 6 called Falcon, which doesn't have foreign keys support yet.
See, the way MySQL works, you can specify an engine for each table (MyISAM, InnoDB, MEMORY, etc.).
Different engines have different characteristics, so for example if you have a "connected sessions" or "active users" table, you can use MySQL's Memory Engine so that the entire thing is in memory all the time. I didn't use that specific engine before, but I believe you lose the data when you kill the mysqld process (I could be wrong).
I like the concept of having different engines since you can choose an engine that was designed to closely suit your needs for a particular table, and will probably help you squeeze more performance out of your database (along with query caching and what not).
I think Oracle has a similar feature, I'm not sure though since I'm not an Oracle DBA (Or a any DBA for that matter).
Google gets huge profits from its keyword advertising, which subsidizes all the other money-losing operations. Sometimes they go through the motions of trying to make the other business profitable, but they don't really have any incentive to do this: Page, Brin, and Schmidt (my emphasis) have a voting majority of shares, and don't really answer to the other stockholders. I thought I heard or read somewhere that VC (Venture Capitalists) pressured Larry and Sergey to hire him (Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO). And it looks like Wikipedia agrees with me:
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with the assistance of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, Inc.) recruited Eric Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the influence of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz. I don't own or run a billion dollars business, but I don't think having the majority of voting stocks make you omnipotent. The business world is just like politics (and they do complement each other), pressure and dirty tricks can be applied to make anyone do anything.
There's no way advertisers are going to accept the idea that mobile versions of pages have no ads.
Advertisers (like Google AdSense) cannot dictate what you do when you offer your content in a separate medium, unless you have some sort of a contract with them.
The only one who would be upset about the lack of advertisements on the mobile version is the content publisher. They (content publishers) can integrate ads in a "screens" fashion like you suggested which will probably be bad for business. Or they can do what sites like Slashdot does, i.e. cripple the mobile version so it's only useful for a quick summary/scan, which forces the user to favor and use the web version that has advertisements.
Ah! but you see, those automotive engineers are probably focused on a specific field of automotive engineering and may not even have the basic skill set that is required to troubleshoot a Volvo, BMW and a Mercedes all in an afternoon (by the way, I know nothing about Cars).
The computing world is so big and diverse that it's impossible for someone to be "top dog" everywhere.
You may be a superb software developer, but you may know nothing about Web programming or Systems Administration. That doesn't make you less of a genius in your field nor does it make the people who are focused on other fields inferior or superior to you.
We all have "geekness" in our blood. Some may prefer debugging kernels and device drivers, others enjoy debugging linked lists in C++, some love the client/server nature of web programming and others enjoy systems administration and building a bewolf cluster of something.
It's all important work and we needed geniuses in all of these fields.
It also depends on which area you're visiting in the US and which cell phone providers cover that area.
If you're coming down to California, T-Mobile is a pretty good choice for pre-paid phones.
I second everyone's opinion on roaming charges being expensive compared to a local pre-paid phone. I have no exact numbers to back this up, so hopefully you can get a hold of your provider soon.
Bottom line, you have to ask yourself: how valuable is it for you to have your Canadian phone number, how long are you going to stay, how many calls are you expecting to make/receive, etc. And then choose the cheapest (or most convenient) option based on your budget.
The problem is that most of the people don't know what their CPUTYPE is. I don't know it either and I have actually build the pc from parts on my own. Is it really impossible to autodetect the CPUTYPE? This is where reading TFM kicks in. From the make.conf example file on FreeBSD:
Sorry if I'm being blunt, but if you can't figure out what CPUTYPE your system has from this list, then you have no business compiling an application on it.
I believe auto detecting the CPU type is already in place on FreeBSD, but this variable is handy for compiling software for different machines using one "central" powerful machine.
I honestly don't know. I got my information from a few store/coffee shop owners that I usually talk to (and joke about signing someone else's name).
I do know that there's a time limit for you to dispute charges, I'm not sure how long exactly but I believe after that you cannot do anything about it.
I don't have a lot of time to post (gotta get back to work, and it's past 12:30am over here), so I'll make this short.
I lived in a lot of places. I lived in Egypt for a little over 5 years. There's a common phrase in Egypt that even law officials repeat "The law does not protect idiots/morons".
Meaning if you got conned by someone (or spilled hot coffee on yourself) the law does not protect you, and you can't really sue anyone for anything (to a certain extent).
Consumer rights are simply non-existent. Bought something that didn't work when you took it home? tough. Bought something that you didn't like/want and want to return it? Are you kidding me?
The buying experience is completely different. I'm still amazed at how stores over here allow you to return things in "30" whole days just because you don't like them and get your money back! Sure, some of them may give you a hard time, but if you can spell the boogie monster's name (BBB) they'll mostly comply.
You don't have that immunity overseas (places I've been to, mainly in the middle east). You bought something that was advertised as something else? sucks for you for falling into the trap.
And by the way, all of this is "fine print"-less.
Sure, I pay a lot more for stuff that I payed way less for when I lived abroad, and some stuff are very ridiculously expensive (gas anyone?), but the immunity, customer experience and consumer "rights" are great here.
"If" you read the fine print and everything you sign in the states, you *are* better off than paying less for an item/product/etc. overseas and most likely getting stiffed for it.
I'm not saying things are perfect; far from it; but what I'm getting at is that it's not *that* bad over here, especially when you put it in a global context.
And finally (to fortify the parents' point), for companies not having to worry about any of this means they don't have to worry about costs of processing merchandise return, frivolous (or legitimate) lawsuits when operating overseas, it makes it easier for them to sell at a lower cost.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd mod you up, but I'm out of mod points.
:)
Your post makes absolute sense. I have at least 500 pictures of my son saved on my computer/backed up. I only printed a few of them to create a calendar that I sent to my parents. (not have albums upon albums saved up like my parents did).
I mainly shop online, meaning I don't drive my car to get to "the mall" and waste gas (and dodge all the flyers they try to hand out)!
Two weak examples, but I'm pretty sure you can easily count the things done with computers vs. without, and computers will be far ahead.
Computers save energy "as it is", when they lower the power needed to run a server/desktop or a datacenter, then it's "that much better".If computers use a tree a day as it is (exaggeration), we'll still be ahead from having no computers at all!
Thanks for the post, it's refreshing to see something like this on Slashdot
cmd
cd \
dir
copy %Application Data%..IE..History..cache...
etc.
*(dir
lol!
:P
I hope you intended that to be in a cartman like voice
Thanks for the laugh.
We have invented *tons* of useless and useful things without the help of DOD or for war purposes.
Anyway, seeing the moderation my comment got and the responses I think my post was lost on this whole discussion so might as well stop replying.
No offense, but if my views were widely popular to be that annoying, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have elected Bush twice nor would we be in war right now.
I'm not trying to start a political war here, it's already happening everywhere else. Just like I said, food for thought*.
*Your appetite may vary
How about stopping the war?
It's great that a lot of DOD investments make it to civilian use at some point (and I think this one will), but I think if we had a bigger research budget elsewhere we would have discovered/invented things without losing lives.
It's probably naive to think that we don't need a defense budget (which is not what I'm advocating), but maybe if we focused more on research and science to cure diseases etc. and not on trying to be better at killing people, the world might just be a better place.
Food for thought.
Now, I do agree with you that security should lie at the foundation of a design, but security also works by constructing layers of defense. No matter how good your design/implementation is, software is very complicated and someone will slip somewhere.
Unless you write your own OS, design your hardware and write its firmware, then write your application on top of all that: You _will_ be depending on someone somewhere to do it, and they may (or may not) mess something up.
The more layers of security you add (hardware firewall, anti-virus, etc.), the more secure you will be at the end.
One of the coolest features I read about PowerShell (not sure if it's still there, I stopped following the whole thing a while ago) is that you can expose parts (all?) of your classes' methods and properties to the command line interface with no additional programming on your part (except maybe indicating that they're command-line accessible).
I don't have a concrete example of it, but it's something along the lines of:
class getInstallFile {
public string name;
public int repo;
public int getInstallFile() {
}
}
Then on the command line someone would call getInstallFile.exe --name='xyz' --repo='2', or something to that effect. (I don't have any
Just like if someone downloads kiddie porn or hosts a torrent of the latest hot single by $artist_name using your open wireless connection, the government/RIAA will come after you.
That's one of the reasons my wireless network is locked down.
Actually I believe it's a lot simpler than that:
- Skype threatens AT&T's international calling business on the iPhone
- Firefox/etc. "steals" Apple's search revenue from Google/MSN/whatever
(When you use Firefox or other browsers and search using the search box built-in the browser they [browser makers] get a cut on advertisement revenue from the search provider. Same thing goes for the nicely branded default home page that is built in).
At least that's my theory.
That being said, I believe it's simply all about the money.
From my fragile understanding of OpenID, is might actually be a Good Thing(TM).
I believe it works like this:
1) You have your own server/domain name (or rely on a 3rd party)
2) You setup Open ID on it, and create accounts like me@mydomain.com
3) You visit site A which utilizes Open ID, and login
4) Site A calls your server with the data/token over encrypted connection asking if it's you
5) Your server responds with "OK, go ahead"
6) Site A fullfils your request (give you candy, or whatever it is you were looking for)
This is a very brief, off-the-top / what I can remember post.
The idea of decentralized authentication network sounds pretty good actually, there are other "cool" points to Open ID, but I'm on my lunch break and I'm short on time.
Feel free to correct me if I'm way off.
I have a theory that the distance between married people in bed grows exponentially with the number of years they were married.
So right around 10 years you're actually sleeping in different rooms!
You mileage may vary
MySQL's default engine (since 5.0?) is innoDB, which supports foreign keys just fine (I have a database full of them). The article was talking about the new engine coming in MySQL 6 called Falcon, which doesn't have foreign keys support yet.
See, the way MySQL works, you can specify an engine for each table (MyISAM, InnoDB, MEMORY, etc.).
Different engines have different characteristics, so for example if you have a "connected sessions" or "active users" table, you can use MySQL's Memory Engine so that the entire thing is in memory all the time. I didn't use that specific engine before, but I believe you lose the data when you kill the mysqld process (I could be wrong).
I like the concept of having different engines since you can choose an engine that was designed to closely suit your needs for a particular table, and will probably help you squeeze more performance out of your database (along with query caching and what not).
I think Oracle has a similar feature, I'm not sure though since I'm not an Oracle DBA (Or a any DBA for that matter).
Just my 2 cents.
Advertisers (like Google AdSense) cannot dictate what you do when you offer your content in a separate medium, unless you have some sort of a contract with them.
The only one who would be upset about the lack of advertisements on the mobile version is the content publisher. They (content publishers) can integrate ads in a "screens" fashion like you suggested which will probably be bad for business. Or they can do what sites like Slashdot does, i.e. cripple the mobile version so it's only useful for a quick summary/scan, which forces the user to favor and use the web version that has advertisements.
Ah! but you see, those automotive engineers are probably focused on a specific field of automotive engineering and may not even have the basic skill set that is required to troubleshoot a Volvo, BMW and a Mercedes all in an afternoon (by the way, I know nothing about Cars).
The computing world is so big and diverse that it's impossible for someone to be "top dog" everywhere.
You may be a superb software developer, but you may know nothing about Web programming or Systems Administration. That doesn't make you less of a genius in your field nor does it make the people who are focused on other fields inferior or superior to you.
We all have "geekness" in our blood. Some may prefer debugging kernels and device drivers, others enjoy debugging linked lists in C++, some love the client/server nature of web programming and others enjoy systems administration and building a bewolf cluster of something.
It's all important work and we needed geniuses in all of these fields.
Just my 2 cents, now back to work...
It also depends on which area you're visiting in the US and which cell phone providers cover that area.
If you're coming down to California, T-Mobile is a pretty good choice for pre-paid phones.
I second everyone's opinion on roaming charges being expensive compared to a local pre-paid phone. I have no exact numbers to back this up, so hopefully you can get a hold of your provider soon.
Bottom line, you have to ask yourself: how valuable is it for you to have your Canadian phone number, how long are you going to stay, how many calls are you expecting to make/receive, etc. And then choose the cheapest (or most convenient) option based on your budget.
Just my 2 cents.
How about reading the discussion from the beginning and understanding the context in which I said what I said?
I believe auto detecting the CPU type is already in place on FreeBSD, but this variable is handy for compiling software for different machines using one "central" powerful machine.
I honestly don't know. I got my information from a few store/coffee shop owners that I usually talk to (and joke about signing someone else's name).
I do know that there's a time limit for you to dispute charges, I'm not sure how long exactly but I believe after that you cannot do anything about it.
I could be wrong.
I'm not really saying it's the _only_ reason, but it definitely is one of the reasons.
There are so many other reasons, including shipping, taxes, gas, etc. that are a lot cheaper overseas.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we're not being screwed over here, I think corporations are screwing everyone all around.
Amen to that!
I don't have a lot of time to post (gotta get back to work, and it's past 12:30am over here), so I'll make this short.
I lived in a lot of places. I lived in Egypt for a little over 5 years.
There's a common phrase in Egypt that even law officials repeat "The law does not protect idiots/morons".
Meaning if you got conned by someone (or spilled hot coffee on yourself) the law does not protect you, and you can't really sue anyone for anything (to a certain extent).
Consumer rights are simply non-existent.
Bought something that didn't work when you took it home? tough.
Bought something that you didn't like/want and want to return it? Are you kidding me?
The buying experience is completely different. I'm still amazed at how stores over here allow you to return things in "30" whole days just because you don't like them and get your money back! Sure, some of them may give you a hard time, but if you can spell the boogie monster's name (BBB) they'll mostly comply.
You don't have that immunity overseas (places I've been to, mainly in the middle east). You bought something that was advertised as something else? sucks for you for falling into the trap.
And by the way, all of this is "fine print"-less.
Sure, I pay a lot more for stuff that I payed way less for when I lived abroad, and some stuff are very ridiculously expensive (gas anyone?), but the immunity, customer experience and consumer "rights" are great here.
"If" you read the fine print and everything you sign in the states, you *are* better off than paying less for an item/product/etc. overseas and most likely getting stiffed for it.
I'm not saying things are perfect; far from it; but what I'm getting at is that it's not *that* bad over here, especially when you put it in a global context.
And finally (to fortify the parents' point), for companies not having to worry about any of this means they don't have to worry about costs of processing merchandise return, frivolous (or legitimate) lawsuits when operating overseas, it makes it easier for them to sell at a lower cost.
Just my 2 cents.