Re:Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
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Two Scoops of Buzz
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#twitter is #awesome #dontjudgeme #imfromc i is #cool cause i read #news on #slashdot.
But seriously, I was able to get news updates faster on Twitter than from CNN during the whole plane crash at IRS building incident. But Twitter on a slow day is like listening to a bunch of kids yapping.
What will be important is the search engines that can filter out all the noise to show things that are important. I haven't seen it yet.
Economics - $$ is #1 (Don't be evil?)
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Two Scoops of Buzz
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· Score: 1
It's probably a lot cheaper to pay out a class-action lawsuit than it is to advertise and persuade and plead and beg people to use their service. Google sold out when they went public (literally) and trends are showing they don't care anymore about their users. The strategy benefits their real customers (advertisers) and their stockholders much more. They drew a line in the sand but just kept adding beach on the other side. It's a show of their lack of conviction, which is common to most people.
It's not that it looks amateurish, it is amateurish. Nobody would care what it looks like if it had (x) killer feature that accomplished a necessary task that (y) program couldn't do. Case in point, Cinepaint. Looks just like Gimp (practically), but doesn't feel as amateurish because holy crap! it has multi-bit-depth editing.
His name is Steve McIntyre and he's been doing a lot of statistics work with temp data. He's a mathemetician, not a climatologist. But when dealing with such large datasets and averaging, the statistics end is just as important as the *physical* science.
AGW is a scientific problem that climatologists can work on. But the effect on our economic, social, geographical, pschological, etc. aspects are not climate issues. Therefore regardless of the result of any global climate study, the climatologist is not in a position to claim what that means for us. If they do make claims without the proper "credentials" as some of you point out, they are acting advocates, not scientists. They must involve those who can interpret what these climate changes will mean for us, the people. Otherwise, they are engaging in the same kind of baseless-claim-making that they accuse their opponents of.
Not to even mention the fact that these studies are as much an exercise at statistics as they are in the scientific measuring, etc. Some of these guys are demonstrably not very good at the statistics portion of their science.
How about an acknowledgement from NASA that a so-called non-credentialed person fixed some of their averaging problems that improperly biased temperatures for years after 2000. There are few more qualified from NASA, and one man corrected their math!
Scientists are provided with facts every day which they either ignore or misinterpret. Case in point - 55% of scientists believe in (please ignore this generic statement) global warming. what's the deal with the other 45%? Are they not real scientists? Do they know something the other 55% don't? Are they just off their rocker? "Proving" something involves the personal choice and acceptance between two people of not only facts, but what ground rules cover those facts and how they can be used. And ultimately, it's a personal choice, regardless of any facts, to believe or disbelieve anything.
Don't believe me? The library has an entire section on crime novels, a number of which have the most implausible scenarios, but someone thought them up and someone would believe they are possible. Conspiracy theorists abound. How do you determine who is on which side of truth vs. conspiracy?
My point is, the statement "Prove X is TRUE for ALL people" is pretty much bogus.
The story was posted about Catholic Church. Not a generic Christian church or even fundamentalist. You are right on target. If aliens land tomorrow and they look like octopuses, it wouldn't change the Catholic Church's position on any faith elements. This is hardly anything that would have "profound implications" on the Catholic faith. While the actual posting of this story was fine, the poster should have consulted with a credible Catholic source before making his own assumptions and making things up.
Absolutely, here's the deal. Your company may have plenty of money right now and all the customers are satisfied. But one day that won't be the case. You know your job is important and you know that your job makes or saves the company lots of money. The CEO wants to see things that make his company profitable. If that's a report on how you are saving software costs by making your own, using magic perl scripting, OSS or some other method, or it's hardware by being cost-effective or some magic virtualization or whatever. Or maybe it's in increased customer productivity which in turn helps the bottom line. He probably does want to see some technical mumbo-jumbo because that's what he hired you for. But he's honestly way more interested in how what you do makes the company more money. End of story. I was in web development / small IT stuff and now I run a company for an experienced CEO. Show the dollars, all the rest is gravy.
Also remember, it is a communications game. All these reports and numbers aren't worth nearly as much if you don't know how to communicate with your boss. And that goes for all the dumbasses who argued above about whether you can ask questions or not. Plus, if you learn better communication, you may not need to ask as many questions because you'll understand what's being required of you in the first place.
OK, so the file name for the Host Notes was "Host Notes - Help & How-to.indd" - tags show file was created in Adobe InDesign CS3 (5.0.4), from file path file:///tmp/All-Parties-All%20Themes.pdf Uh, where's the C:? Last I checked, Windows didn't have a/tmp volume. Haha, Windows 7 party so lame, the party planners wouldn't even use the damn OS.
I'll tell you what everyone needs, ex: current economy. Everyone needs a basic personal finances course in high school and basic microeconomics. They also need basic law principles.
Young people are being asked to borrow tens of thousands of dollars for a job they might see in 4 years after getting a piece of paper. They will also need car, clothing, housing, and may be looking to marry. $$$ They need the basics on how it works so they can set themselves up in a good way and know why they get where they get.
Every job field now (in the US at least) requires tiptoeing around the complex legal system so someone doesn't sue you and put your company out of business. It's a huge burden on small businesses and therefore the job market as well. Young people are more valuable to themselves and their employers if they understand the basics of how the legal system works. It would be good for all of them to understand more law regarding roadways, tickets, and how to handle them. Or the basics of tort so an employee understands that they put a lot of people, families, and jobs at legal risk by cutting corners, and how companies can be liable for stupid things even if they technically didn't do anything wrong. For example, most people know about the McDonald's case where the woman sued over the hot coffee. McDonald's wasn't required to change their coffee, only the sign on the cup. FUCKING STUPID!
Hey you bunch of nerds. All you software engineers spend a lot of time with all the keys on the keyboard except for A-Z. For a while when I was learning to program, I could find the brackets and operators faster than I could any of the letters. We're so out of whack on this one it's crazy.
I learned to type via instant messaging. Our kids will learn to type through a cell phone before they get out of elementary school. They will have used a variety of keyboards and learning QWERTY will be just a slight modification of what they already know. For all we know, one of them will invent a new keyboard format out of text-messaging and make all of us obsolete.
I agree that PHP is a great examples language, but there is a problem with using it with websites to learn programming. Then you have to get into which web language to use. HTML 4 Transitional? HTML 4 Strict? XHTML? And no one writes strict HTML anyways. Which also means no one knows how to teach strict HTML. Which means that a lot of HTML development ends up with missing ending tags, sloppy formatting, and poor form. Sure, you could do it right, but this begins quickly getting in the way of teaching the most basic introductory programming.
What's wrong with Scheme? It's intuitive, self-explanatory, has plenty of online documentation, many well-coded examples, great strings processing - oh, wait, WTF am I thinking of? Yeah, Scheme might be great for programming gurus to sit around and contemplate. And it's needed for working with some GIMP scripts. But you want to run off a promising, learning, computer sci student, teach them Scheme. I still say BASIC is a great starting point. You can teach programming concepts in 1-2 classes, then move on to languages.
off topic - I run an ecommerce website. I am a geek. All the other "businesses" in my competition seem to be missing that very concept. I get a lot of business by default and my competitors can't match my sales. Seems common sense, huh?
Simple, disclaim any liability. Microsoft and a lot of other vendors do. If you tell them "I can't guarantee the accuracy of any of this data and you should do a full review," and they say "Do it anyway," make sure you get that in writing and you'll be fine.
I agree, except you should claim "I CAN guarantee that the data is NOT accurate and you should do a full review." Don't let them have any expectation that they can rely on it at all.
If you don't like it, contact your representative and request tort reform and liability reform. Nobody prefers covering ass to actually helping someone. Even if the customers don't sue you, their insurance companies will. Anyways, all it takes is one angry customer (many of us have had one like this) threaten to sue before completely redefining business policies.
Yeah, I might help a few more people if I don't "cover my ass." But that will be small consolation when my business is sued, becomes defunct, and I'm out on the street. What then am I going to tell my wife and kids? "Well, I was just trying to help the guy. It's not my fault that I got sued." That's not going to be an answer I can live with.
Yeah, I have ReiserFS on my laptop, and everyone here should really switch to that for Desktops at earliest convenience. Quick fsck, reasonably reliable, extremely fast, extremely fast, faster than ext3, faster than ext4, very fast.
On my desktop computer however, I didn't have the time to take the system down to re-format for ReiserFS. So I switched to ext4 because it's faster. Time is money, don't argue "don't fix it if it ain't broke" with me. I'll tell you when it's broke. When the long-abandoned ReiserFS is fast as shit on a slow machine, but the ext3 looks like performance wasn't even considered when used on more recent hardware. Time is money guys. Yes, I can be more productive with ext4 when I have 8 virtual desktops and multiple projects for multiple companies requiring completely different application sets simultaneously on my computer and just trying not to get more than a week behind on any of them.
I completely agree. All of my SQL variables are escaped IMMEDIATELY before the executed code. This way, you can look at any SQL code I've written and instantly know if it's secure or not. I would call this code "obviously secure" (at least the SQL part is). It may still contain bugs, but SQL injection won't be possible.
I've seen several other safety mechanisms that escape any variables before sending them to SQL-related functions, but looking inside the function (instead of the caller) you really don't know what data you have and whether it is safe or not.
I think secure code should be obviously secure. Of course there are those buffer overflow problems and threading etc like you mention, but how about quit using sprintf and instead use snprintf? WTF? And don't give me that "If I know I'm just printing a simple variable and I know how long it is, then it's OK" crap either. Ever seen a calculator come up with a wrong answer that was really close? Like 3.99897876 instead of 4? I have. And we all know that there have been widely-used CPUs with math processor errors. If your code isn't obviously secure, I argue that it's not secure. Especially if you aren't the only developer in the pipeline. We all organize this code differently in our own heads and what makes sense to one dev is confusing to another. If the code is obviously secure, most of that is eliminated anyways.
We need more people who stand for the things that you do! Many people take a stand for what they believe in as long as it does not affect their security or life's comforts. You have gone outside your comfort zone and taken a stand. I can appreciate that. BTW, you may be interested that I am working on an open source Visual C++ IDE for windows that uses the G++ compiler. See http://www.calcmaster.net/visual-c++/ or email me at josephcmiller2-NOTSPAMME-@gmail.com
Slashdot Mirror
#twitter is #awesome #dontjudgeme #imfromc i is #cool cause i read #news on #slashdot.
But seriously, I was able to get news updates faster on Twitter than from CNN during the whole plane crash at IRS building incident. But Twitter on a slow day is like listening to a bunch of kids yapping.
What will be important is the search engines that can filter out all the noise to show things that are important. I haven't seen it yet.
It's probably a lot cheaper to pay out a class-action lawsuit than it is to advertise and persuade and plead and beg people to use their service. Google sold out when they went public (literally) and trends are showing they don't care anymore about their users. The strategy benefits their real customers (advertisers) and their stockholders much more. They drew a line in the sand but just kept adding beach on the other side. It's a show of their lack of conviction, which is common to most people.
It's not that it looks amateurish, it is amateurish. Nobody would care what it looks like if it had (x) killer feature that accomplished a necessary task that (y) program couldn't do. Case in point, Cinepaint. Looks just like Gimp (practically), but doesn't feel as amateurish because holy crap! it has multi-bit-depth editing.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/200708.html
His name is Steve McIntyre and he's been doing a lot of statistics work with temp data. He's a mathemetician, not a climatologist. But when dealing with such large datasets and averaging, the statistics end is just as important as the *physical* science.
AGW is a scientific problem that climatologists can work on. But the effect on our economic, social, geographical, pschological, etc. aspects are not climate issues. Therefore regardless of the result of any global climate study, the climatologist is not in a position to claim what that means for us. If they do make claims without the proper "credentials" as some of you point out, they are acting advocates, not scientists. They must involve those who can interpret what these climate changes will mean for us, the people. Otherwise, they are engaging in the same kind of baseless-claim-making that they accuse their opponents of.
Not to even mention the fact that these studies are as much an exercise at statistics as they are in the scientific measuring, etc. Some of these guys are demonstrably not very good at the statistics portion of their science.
How about an acknowledgement from NASA that a so-called non-credentialed person fixed some of their averaging problems that improperly biased temperatures for years after 2000. There are few more qualified from NASA, and one man corrected their math!
Scientists are provided with facts every day which they either ignore or misinterpret. Case in point - 55% of scientists believe in (please ignore this generic statement) global warming. what's the deal with the other 45%? Are they not real scientists? Do they know something the other 55% don't? Are they just off their rocker? "Proving" something involves the personal choice and acceptance between two people of not only facts, but what ground rules cover those facts and how they can be used. And ultimately, it's a personal choice, regardless of any facts, to believe or disbelieve anything.
Don't believe me? The library has an entire section on crime novels, a number of which have the most implausible scenarios, but someone thought them up and someone would believe they are possible. Conspiracy theorists abound. How do you determine who is on which side of truth vs. conspiracy?
My point is, the statement "Prove X is TRUE for ALL people" is pretty much bogus.
The story was posted about Catholic Church. Not a generic Christian church or even fundamentalist. You are right on target. If aliens land tomorrow and they look like octopuses, it wouldn't change the Catholic Church's position on any faith elements. This is hardly anything that would have "profound implications" on the Catholic faith. While the actual posting of this story was fine, the poster should have consulted with a credible Catholic source before making his own assumptions and making things up.
Absolutely, here's the deal. Your company may have plenty of money right now and all the customers are satisfied. But one day that won't be the case. You know your job is important and you know that your job makes or saves the company lots of money. The CEO wants to see things that make his company profitable. If that's a report on how you are saving software costs by making your own, using magic perl scripting, OSS or some other method, or it's hardware by being cost-effective or some magic virtualization or whatever. Or maybe it's in increased customer productivity which in turn helps the bottom line. He probably does want to see some technical mumbo-jumbo because that's what he hired you for. But he's honestly way more interested in how what you do makes the company more money. End of story. I was in web development / small IT stuff and now I run a company for an experienced CEO. Show the dollars, all the rest is gravy.
Also remember, it is a communications game. All these reports and numbers aren't worth nearly as much if you don't know how to communicate with your boss. And that goes for all the dumbasses who argued above about whether you can ask questions or not. Plus, if you learn better communication, you may not need to ask as many questions because you'll understand what's being required of you in the first place.
OK, so the file name for the Host Notes was "Host Notes - Help & How-to.indd" - tags show file was created in Adobe InDesign CS3 (5.0.4), from file path file:///tmp/All-Parties-All%20Themes.pdf Uh, where's the C:? Last I checked, Windows didn't have a /tmp volume. Haha, Windows 7 party so lame, the party planners wouldn't even use the damn OS.
I'll tell you what everyone needs, ex: current economy. Everyone needs a basic personal finances course in high school and basic microeconomics. They also need basic law principles.
Young people are being asked to borrow tens of thousands of dollars for a job they might see in 4 years after getting a piece of paper. They will also need car, clothing, housing, and may be looking to marry. $$$ They need the basics on how it works so they can set themselves up in a good way and know why they get where they get.
Every job field now (in the US at least) requires tiptoeing around the complex legal system so someone doesn't sue you and put your company out of business. It's a huge burden on small businesses and therefore the job market as well. Young people are more valuable to themselves and their employers if they understand the basics of how the legal system works. It would be good for all of them to understand more law regarding roadways, tickets, and how to handle them. Or the basics of tort so an employee understands that they put a lot of people, families, and jobs at legal risk by cutting corners, and how companies can be liable for stupid things even if they technically didn't do anything wrong. For example, most people know about the McDonald's case where the woman sued over the hot coffee. McDonald's wasn't required to change their coffee, only the sign on the cup. FUCKING STUPID!
Hey you bunch of nerds. All you software engineers spend a lot of time with all the keys on the keyboard except for A-Z. For a while when I was learning to program, I could find the brackets and operators faster than I could any of the letters. We're so out of whack on this one it's crazy.
I learned to type via instant messaging. Our kids will learn to type through a cell phone before they get out of elementary school. They will have used a variety of keyboards and learning QWERTY will be just a slight modification of what they already know. For all we know, one of them will invent a new keyboard format out of text-messaging and make all of us obsolete.
I agree that PHP is a great examples language, but there is a problem with using it with websites to learn programming. Then you have to get into which web language to use. HTML 4 Transitional? HTML 4 Strict? XHTML? And no one writes strict HTML anyways. Which also means no one knows how to teach strict HTML. Which means that a lot of HTML development ends up with missing ending tags, sloppy formatting, and poor form. Sure, you could do it right, but this begins quickly getting in the way of teaching the most basic introductory programming.
Screw you, notepad kicks ass! How else would I have been able to "program" my first web page complete with frames, marquees, and blinking text?!
On second thought, if you're using notepad, you're stuck on a Win32/64 platform. Pretty limited for learning programming IMHO.
What's wrong with Scheme? It's intuitive, self-explanatory, has plenty of online documentation, many well-coded examples, great strings processing - oh, wait, WTF am I thinking of? Yeah, Scheme might be great for programming gurus to sit around and contemplate. And it's needed for working with some GIMP scripts. But you want to run off a promising, learning, computer sci student, teach them Scheme. I still say BASIC is a great starting point. You can teach programming concepts in 1-2 classes, then move on to languages.
off topic - I run an ecommerce website. I am a geek. All the other "businesses" in my competition seem to be missing that very concept. I get a lot of business by default and my competitors can't match my sales. Seems common sense, huh?
Simple, disclaim any liability. Microsoft and a lot of other vendors do. If you tell them "I can't guarantee the accuracy of any of this data and you should do a full review," and they say "Do it anyway," make sure you get that in writing and you'll be fine.
I agree, except you should claim "I CAN guarantee that the data is NOT accurate and you should do a full review." Don't let them have any expectation that they can rely on it at all.
If you don't like it, contact your representative and request tort reform and liability reform. Nobody prefers covering ass to actually helping someone. Even if the customers don't sue you, their insurance companies will. Anyways, all it takes is one angry customer (many of us have had one like this) threaten to sue before completely redefining business policies. Yeah, I might help a few more people if I don't "cover my ass." But that will be small consolation when my business is sued, becomes defunct, and I'm out on the street. What then am I going to tell my wife and kids? "Well, I was just trying to help the guy. It's not my fault that I got sued." That's not going to be an answer I can live with.
Wonder how long it will be before someone develops sexual games for a device like this.
Yeah, I have ReiserFS on my laptop, and everyone here should really switch to that for Desktops at earliest convenience. Quick fsck, reasonably reliable, extremely fast, extremely fast, faster than ext3, faster than ext4, very fast. On my desktop computer however, I didn't have the time to take the system down to re-format for ReiserFS. So I switched to ext4 because it's faster. Time is money, don't argue "don't fix it if it ain't broke" with me. I'll tell you when it's broke. When the long-abandoned ReiserFS is fast as shit on a slow machine, but the ext3 looks like performance wasn't even considered when used on more recent hardware. Time is money guys. Yes, I can be more productive with ext4 when I have 8 virtual desktops and multiple projects for multiple companies requiring completely different application sets simultaneously on my computer and just trying not to get more than a week behind on any of them.
md5sums no longer safe - use SHA256
Answer - change POSIX.
I completely agree. All of my SQL variables are escaped IMMEDIATELY before the executed code. This way, you can look at any SQL code I've written and instantly know if it's secure or not. I would call this code "obviously secure" (at least the SQL part is). It may still contain bugs, but SQL injection won't be possible. I've seen several other safety mechanisms that escape any variables before sending them to SQL-related functions, but looking inside the function (instead of the caller) you really don't know what data you have and whether it is safe or not. I think secure code should be obviously secure. Of course there are those buffer overflow problems and threading etc like you mention, but how about quit using sprintf and instead use snprintf? WTF? And don't give me that "If I know I'm just printing a simple variable and I know how long it is, then it's OK" crap either. Ever seen a calculator come up with a wrong answer that was really close? Like 3.99897876 instead of 4? I have. And we all know that there have been widely-used CPUs with math processor errors. If your code isn't obviously secure, I argue that it's not secure. Especially if you aren't the only developer in the pipeline. We all organize this code differently in our own heads and what makes sense to one dev is confusing to another. If the code is obviously secure, most of that is eliminated anyways.
If they had TSA agents standing at all the firewalls, making each packet take off it's shoes before proceeding - this could have been stopped.
We need more people who stand for the things that you do! Many people take a stand for what they believe in as long as it does not affect their security or life's comforts. You have gone outside your comfort zone and taken a stand. I can appreciate that. BTW, you may be interested that I am working on an open source Visual C++ IDE for windows that uses the G++ compiler. See http://www.calcmaster.net/visual-c++/ or email me at josephcmiller2-NOTSPAMME-@gmail.com