Take your classes out into the world with those devices, project and draw on the side of your school building. Sketching out the equipment for your physics tests: the seesaws on the playground greased down with lard for example. Or the roller coaster, and a slice of pie on to be *dropped* at the loop. Use real world objects and situations that people can understand, instead of a perfectly spherical spring falling from the sky with a monkey climbing a rope on a pulley hooked to a parachute (unless of course you can sketch that, and then make it happen, because that's fair too.
Unless... you didn't get a day-bright battery powered wireless projector and tablet? Then I don't know, you're screwed, you should mail the devices to me, I'll *hold* them for you till you get back from jail for embezzling or misappropriating resources from the government.
A la carte sounds good to me. With only a few channels I could cover every channel I intentionally watch.
SciFi
Comedy Central
TNT
tbs
Cartoon Network
CNN just in case something big happens
and since I'm paying so little why not: Playboy Channel:D
I'm a big fan of those DVR's/cable boxes/decoders that let you save a custom preset list of channels. The directtv box I have and am trying to sell has that, and that was probably my most loved feature. Most of the time I'd just watch the preset list, and it was funny when I noticed about once a month DirectTV would automatically reinsert the shopping channel and an ondemand channel into my preset list. Blatant commercialism. With only 5 channels in the preset, any changes like that I would notice the moment I had to page down to see all of the channels I wanted in the tv guide. I'm annoyed that the comcast box we have doesn't have the favorites list or makes it impossible to find.
I guess my thoughts on the matter are that any legitimate whistleblowing has channels to do so no matter what this rule says. Assuming that to be true (which it may not be) then looking out at the happenings in the past 5-10 years, I'd say many more harm was done by the opinion of disgruntled employees being taken and sensationalized by the press, than was done by the logical enforcing of a clear voicebox for an organization. So as long as the assumption holds (that whistleblowing for safety/legal/ethical concerns has enough legal available channels) then this ruling IMHO is a good thing. Many engineers would like to speak for their organization to support it at times. The problem is that they aren't always in possession of all the facts, and so by their well meaning comments they lead the press to start questioning anyone and everyone putting them on the spot to see how they can slip up and make a more sensational news story. Some people even though they know all the facts aren't necessarily the best equipped to verbally convey those facts to the press in a clear manner. This lets the press learn if there is really a story without all the sensationalism, and helps the public by making news reporting more accurate (though possibly less entertaining).
I feel like I wasn't too coherent in the above, but hopefully my meaning will get across. Any thoughts?
I think you missed the point of this move. This move does not prohibit employees from talking with the press, what it explicitly enforces is that the only official voice of the organization is its head. I fail to see how this is a lack of transparency, because anything employees say can still meet the press. Any allegations of bribery etc, can still get to the press. This just means that a random engineer can't claim to represent the whole organization. This seems like a very sensible policy to have in place. Many organizations have to have their lawyers present whenever anyone gets interviewed or have a pre-interview with the lawyers where they delineate what things the engineers are allowed to comment on and what they are not. With a blanket ban on this, there is no misunderstanding, the press knows that no employees can be considered to represent the organization without explicit clear approval. On a case by case basis, the head could allow specific people to meet on the record for specific purposes.
If I'm wrong or missing something please let me know.
Well what do you think wikipedia is all about? "Hearing things in other people's words" in some cases many other people, with hopefully only the best and most accurate wording remaining... In this case all my knowledge comes from the networking I did in college (from a tiny bit of very low level, to using various libraries in C C++ Java and C#) from reading the documentation for those libraries, and from the little programming I did with FTP on PPC. At every step in my learning wikipedia has been invaluable. When I read articles on wikipedia, I'll open any link that seems remotely interesting in a new tab, when I finish reading the article I'll close it, and read the next tab, and repeat. This has exponential growth until you either hit a sequence of leaf articles (read "stub") or you've exhausted the topic at hand and managed not to find any links to other topics or you're time pressed and so you stop opening tabs. In any case the wikipedia article on endianness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness is pretty fleshed out.
Selected quotes:
Intel's x86 processors use the little-endian format (sometimes called the Intel format). Motorola processors have generally used big-endian. PowerPC (which includes Apple's Macintosh line prior to the Intel switch) and System/370 also adopt big-endian. SPARC historically used big-endian, though version 9 is bi-endian (see below).
Endianness in networking
Networks generally use big-endian order, and thus it is called network order when sending information over a network in a common format. The historical reason is that this allowed routing while a telephone number was being composed. In fact, the Internet Protocol defines a standard big-endian network byte order. This byte order is used for all numeric values in the packet headers and by many higher level protocols and file formats that are designed for use over IP. The Berkeley sockets API defines a set of functions to convert 16- and 32-bit integers to and from network byte order: the htonl (host-to-network-long) and htons (host-to-network-short) functions convert 32-bit and 16-bit values respectively from machine (host) to network order; whereas the ntohl and ntohs functions convert from network to host order.
While the lowest network protocols may deal with sub-byte formatting, all the layers above them usually consider the byte (mostly meant as octet) as their atomic unit.
Basically, in part from the lower level networking, I learned to love languages that had modularity and a great group of people writing libraries for them. In my opinion there is significant value in picking and choosing the right components for a job. Having to write libraries for yourself is just a pain unless you're certain you have the time to maintain them all in every language you use and your certain that the value you will get out of writing the library is worth the time. Trusting an opensource project to make a great robust networking library (with appropriate testing) lets you focus more on your project's logic, presentation, and "secret sauce" and less on the drudgery of laying every foundation pebble by pebble.
You're absolutely right, I hadn't personally had to worry about endianness in a long while, especially since most of the time (that I've seen) a good network library will have "convertToNetworkByteOrder() and convertToLocalByteOrder()" type functions - or silently handle it, so all you have to remember about endianness is that you have to remember to throw your data through a filter like that before you use it.
Speak for yourself! I hate the (cigarette dropping) sinners. I worked one summer at a small general store, and I hated the days I had to spend in the sun out front picking up people's dropped cigarette butts, pulling them out of mulch and bushes and from between the sidewalk cracks. Just to make the place look good. We did have ashtrays specifically for tossing them, but no, the smokers just dropped them wherever.
The total number of SPAM posts you've made about Ron Paul has created and attached a feeling of hate and frustration to Ron Paul even though I had pretty much nothing against him till this point. I will most definitely not watch the videos you linked, and when election day rolls around, I will have this hate attached to his name that I will have forgotten the origin for. Congratulations, you tried to SPAM a community of people pretty intensely against spam in general. You lose, and because of you Ron Paul loses too.
The thing with programmers is that it's often hard to identify the effects a specific bug could have in a specific system. A library writer may know in a set of unlikely conditions, some function calls could lead to a failure to allocate a string. They may then return null to the caller for the library in that 1 case, but barring out of memory conditions, will never return null otherwise. A *user* for that library comes along, the library writer has a good reputation and the documentation for the library is very solid. He does his best effort, time permitting, to write secure code, he may even do a solid job of testing, when pressed for time, he has never triggered this specific error case, and his code doesn't know how to deal with a null pointer like that. Now imagine suddenly that this second guy could be another library writer, or he could be a maintainer. He may never know the details of every place his library or component is used, he just sees the applications he runs which appear to work fine with his library. Ethically the writer of the final product is responsible for the damage it causes, but unfortunately it's not as clear cut as real-world engineering. The first library writer's product is used everywhere, and others may trigger this specific error condition, but compensate for it by coincidentally knowing the circumstances that cause it cause other problems for them, or by programming in a paranoid fashion because they're a small project and absolutely trust noone. The second library layer may have been written before the bug in the first library was actually introduced. With the real world we have standards and clear specification requirements (sometimes). You can simulate a subcomponent that was contracted out to someone, and you can verify that the forces through your structure won't be above the tolerances for that component or that it's failure will be in known and acceptable modes. With the nesting of libraries and code programmers have it much harder. There are many libraries with many subcomponents of other subcomponents. Sometimes the subcomponents can be changed out from under a library, so the final application has no hope of knowing everything about the subcomponent change. Failures of a subcomponent can mean nothing in some applications or can mean more in others.
The end of it all is also that it's not like a manager chose to force a programmer to pick the paperclick option, it's that a manager said you get this much testing time, at the end of that timeperiod the programmer has caught all the glaring bugs, and he's left with the knowledge that everything he anticipated (unit tests) is being handled. He doesn't have the certainty that everything is okay, but very few non-trivial program writers do, he could spend an extra year testing and never catch this one bug. It's only because 68 very large clients with thousands of users started testing the application for a continuously long amount of time that somebody eventually ran into the bug. It's like letting a small town's worth of people into the foundation of a skyscraper. You don't have a choice about them going there, so your code tries to catch anything that could cause damage. Your code manages to take away all the bombs and all the bulldozers, but you're still left with people with small chisels. You would think that they can't do anything with the chisel, but can you be 100% certain that they don't manage to chisel away until they make a hole in your pneumatic message transferring system (that was of course not part of your original design and analysis for this foundation, and was installed by a 3rd party contractor), and end up receiving all the messages for awhile including paychecks and SSN's of all your employees?
Very good point, ruby is just a very different experience than my coding with mootools. In any case the question still stands, what has been replacing ajax and php?
So what is ajax and php losing ground to? The only *new* thing out there that might have been gaining traction that I know about is ruby, and that one doesn't seem to be gaining that much traction because of it's issues at scaling to large sizes (or so I read).
So... since the first day I saw this troll on slashdot, I've been pretty confused about the purpose of this troll, and what it's message is supposed to be. Ignoring the obvious flame content at the beginning, what is the complaint exactly? That Apple takes too long between revisions? Waits till things are stable instead of releasing buggy code (like Debian), or what?
Thanks for your links! I had been of the uncertain belief that the gpl was not viral, because you can't force people to do anything, you can only enforce penalties if they break the law. So a company that used gpl'ed code could be levied penalties preventing further distribution of closed source copyright infringement, to the point that the company gets held in contempt, fined, dissolved etc. But no legal remedy would ever guarantee the right to see the sourcecode and have it be GPL. But obviously I'm not a lawyer so I just had the belief that it wasn't viral, I didn't know the exact legally valid reasons to support that. The groklaw article is clear, easy to read, and unequivocal in its explanation.
Congratulations on an informative and interesting series of comments and elucidations. I'd read about most of what you covered in this weird "flamewar" previously, but hadn't seen everything tied together quite so well in the past. Remember the old saying that goes somewhat like: "Don't argue with a fool because a stranger might come upon you and fail to know who is who" Though in this case, I don't think you're in trouble of being taken for a troll.:P
I think it deals with recent hypervisor rootkits. Via google and extra keywords of hypervisor and security, you should be able to find more literature.
They could tether him with a nice and visible wire, and have people on stage at the other end of the leash... maybe people would start to get the hint? Of course with our luck people would just think him brave for admitting he's a puppet.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, but then they can just put some new IP's behind their round-robin dns server, and retire the old ones, and your bots will never know!
Is that your powerpack or are you just happy to see me?
- then make it happen, because that's fair too.
+ then make it happen, because that's fair too).
sorry.
Take your classes out into the world with those devices, project and draw on the side of your school building. Sketching out the equipment for your physics tests: the seesaws on the playground greased down with lard for example. Or the roller coaster, and a slice of pie on to be *dropped* at the loop. Use real world objects and situations that people can understand, instead of a perfectly spherical spring falling from the sky with a monkey climbing a rope on a pulley hooked to a parachute (unless of course you can sketch that, and then make it happen, because that's fair too.
Unless... you didn't get a day-bright battery powered wireless projector and tablet? Then I don't know, you're screwed, you should mail the devices to me, I'll *hold* them for you till you get back from jail for embezzling or misappropriating resources from the government.
" do not leave dangling quotes, they make me feel uncomfortable!
I'm a big fan of those DVR's/cable boxes/decoders that let you save a custom preset list of channels. The directtv box I have and am trying to sell has that, and that was probably my most loved feature. Most of the time I'd just watch the preset list, and it was funny when I noticed about once a month DirectTV would automatically reinsert the shopping channel and an ondemand channel into my preset list. Blatant commercialism. With only 5 channels in the preset, any changes like that I would notice the moment I had to page down to see all of the channels I wanted in the tv guide. I'm annoyed that the comcast box we have doesn't have the favorites list or makes it impossible to find.
I guess my thoughts on the matter are that any legitimate whistleblowing has channels to do so no matter what this rule says. Assuming that to be true (which it may not be) then looking out at the happenings in the past 5-10 years, I'd say many more harm was done by the opinion of disgruntled employees being taken and sensationalized by the press, than was done by the logical enforcing of a clear voicebox for an organization. So as long as the assumption holds (that whistleblowing for safety/legal/ethical concerns has enough legal available channels) then this ruling IMHO is a good thing. Many engineers would like to speak for their organization to support it at times. The problem is that they aren't always in possession of all the facts, and so by their well meaning comments they lead the press to start questioning anyone and everyone putting them on the spot to see how they can slip up and make a more sensational news story. Some people even though they know all the facts aren't necessarily the best equipped to verbally convey those facts to the press in a clear manner. This lets the press learn if there is really a story without all the sensationalism, and helps the public by making news reporting more accurate (though possibly less entertaining).
I feel like I wasn't too coherent in the above, but hopefully my meaning will get across. Any thoughts?
I think you missed the point of this move. This move does not prohibit employees from talking with the press, what it explicitly enforces is that the only official voice of the organization is its head. I fail to see how this is a lack of transparency, because anything employees say can still meet the press. Any allegations of bribery etc, can still get to the press. This just means that a random engineer can't claim to represent the whole organization. This seems like a very sensible policy to have in place. Many organizations have to have their lawyers present whenever anyone gets interviewed or have a pre-interview with the lawyers where they delineate what things the engineers are allowed to comment on and what they are not. With a blanket ban on this, there is no misunderstanding, the press knows that no employees can be considered to represent the organization without explicit clear approval. On a case by case basis, the head could allow specific people to meet on the record for specific purposes.
If I'm wrong or missing something please let me know.
Selected quotes: Basically, in part from the lower level networking, I learned to love languages that had modularity and a great group of people writing libraries for them. In my opinion there is significant value in picking and choosing the right components for a job. Having to write libraries for yourself is just a pain unless you're certain you have the time to maintain them all in every language you use and your certain that the value you will get out of writing the library is worth the time. Trusting an opensource project to make a great robust networking library (with appropriate testing) lets you focus more on your project's logic, presentation, and "secret sauce" and less on the drudgery of laying every foundation pebble by pebble.
You're absolutely right, I hadn't personally had to worry about endianness in a long while, especially since most of the time (that I've seen) a good network library will have "convertToNetworkByteOrder() and convertToLocalByteOrder()" type functions - or silently handle it, so all you have to remember about endianness is that you have to remember to throw your data through a filter like that before you use it.
So it's your fault my torrents are being blocked and reset all the time!
Speak for yourself! I hate the (cigarette dropping) sinners. I worked one summer at a small general store, and I hated the days I had to spend in the sun out front picking up people's dropped cigarette butts, pulling them out of mulch and bushes and from between the sidewalk cracks. Just to make the place look good. We did have ashtrays specifically for tossing them, but no, the smokers just dropped them wherever.
The total number of SPAM posts you've made about Ron Paul has created and attached a feeling of hate and frustration to Ron Paul even though I had pretty much nothing against him till this point. I will most definitely not watch the videos you linked, and when election day rolls around, I will have this hate attached to his name that I will have forgotten the origin for. Congratulations, you tried to SPAM a community of people pretty intensely against spam in general. You lose, and because of you Ron Paul loses too.
The french version seems more appropriate here than your paraphrase. Is that wrong of me to feel that way?
The thing with programmers is that it's often hard to identify the effects a specific bug could have in a specific system. A library writer may know in a set of unlikely conditions, some function calls could lead to a failure to allocate a string. They may then return null to the caller for the library in that 1 case, but barring out of memory conditions, will never return null otherwise. A *user* for that library comes along, the library writer has a good reputation and the documentation for the library is very solid. He does his best effort, time permitting, to write secure code, he may even do a solid job of testing, when pressed for time, he has never triggered this specific error case, and his code doesn't know how to deal with a null pointer like that. Now imagine suddenly that this second guy could be another library writer, or he could be a maintainer. He may never know the details of every place his library or component is used, he just sees the applications he runs which appear to work fine with his library. Ethically the writer of the final product is responsible for the damage it causes, but unfortunately it's not as clear cut as real-world engineering. The first library writer's product is used everywhere, and others may trigger this specific error condition, but compensate for it by coincidentally knowing the circumstances that cause it cause other problems for them, or by programming in a paranoid fashion because they're a small project and absolutely trust noone. The second library layer may have been written before the bug in the first library was actually introduced. With the real world we have standards and clear specification requirements (sometimes). You can simulate a subcomponent that was contracted out to someone, and you can verify that the forces through your structure won't be above the tolerances for that component or that it's failure will be in known and acceptable modes. With the nesting of libraries and code programmers have it much harder. There are many libraries with many subcomponents of other subcomponents. Sometimes the subcomponents can be changed out from under a library, so the final application has no hope of knowing everything about the subcomponent change. Failures of a subcomponent can mean nothing in some applications or can mean more in others.
The end of it all is also that it's not like a manager chose to force a programmer to pick the paperclick option, it's that a manager said you get this much testing time, at the end of that timeperiod the programmer has caught all the glaring bugs, and he's left with the knowledge that everything he anticipated (unit tests) is being handled. He doesn't have the certainty that everything is okay, but very few non-trivial program writers do, he could spend an extra year testing and never catch this one bug. It's only because 68 very large clients with thousands of users started testing the application for a continuously long amount of time that somebody eventually ran into the bug. It's like letting a small town's worth of people into the foundation of a skyscraper. You don't have a choice about them going there, so your code tries to catch anything that could cause damage. Your code manages to take away all the bombs and all the bulldozers, but you're still left with people with small chisels. You would think that they can't do anything with the chisel, but can you be 100% certain that they don't manage to chisel away until they make a hole in your pneumatic message transferring system (that was of course not part of your original design and analysis for this foundation, and was installed by a 3rd party contractor), and end up receiving all the messages for awhile including paychecks and SSN's of all your employees?
Very good point, ruby is just a very different experience than my coding with mootools. In any case the question still stands, what has been replacing ajax and php?
So what is ajax and php losing ground to? The only *new* thing out there that might have been gaining traction that I know about is ruby, and that one doesn't seem to be gaining that much traction because of it's issues at scaling to large sizes (or so I read).
So... since the first day I saw this troll on slashdot, I've been pretty confused about the purpose of this troll, and what it's message is supposed to be. Ignoring the obvious flame content at the beginning, what is the complaint exactly? That Apple takes too long between revisions? Waits till things are stable instead of releasing buggy code (like Debian), or what?
Thanks for your links! I had been of the uncertain belief that the gpl was not viral, because you can't force people to do anything, you can only enforce penalties if they break the law. So a company that used gpl'ed code could be levied penalties preventing further distribution of closed source copyright infringement, to the point that the company gets held in contempt, fined, dissolved etc. But no legal remedy would ever guarantee the right to see the sourcecode and have it be GPL. But obviously I'm not a lawyer so I just had the belief that it wasn't viral, I didn't know the exact legally valid reasons to support that. The groklaw article is clear, easy to read, and unequivocal in its explanation.
Thanks for the informative post.
and surprisingly annoying...
No, it crystallizes!
Congratulations on an informative and interesting series of comments and elucidations. I'd read about most of what you covered in this weird "flamewar" previously, but hadn't seen everything tied together quite so well in the past. Remember the old saying that goes somewhat like: "Don't argue with a fool because a stranger might come upon you and fail to know who is who" Though in this case, I don't think you're in trouble of being taken for a troll. :P
big endian vs little endian!
Finally, someone reawakens that war...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=334
I think it deals with recent hypervisor rootkits. Via google and extra keywords of hypervisor and security, you should be able to find more literature.
They could tether him with a nice and visible wire, and have people on stage at the other end of the leash... maybe people would start to get the hint? Of course with our luck people would just think him brave for admitting he's a puppet.