Excel is terrible at math and rounding, sure it's fine for small tasks but if you try to amortize a 30 year mortgage you will be off compared to any financial institutions calculations.
Wow, that's the first time I've ever read a complaint about Excel's math. Perhaps my memory is bad! I'm also surprised to read your comment about financial institutions, I guess I just assumed that's what they would use. Every company I've done work for has relied on Excel for most of their calculations. The odd client runs SAP but Excel has pride of place in my experience. For my own limited needs I find LibreOffice's Calc more than sufficient.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm quite interested to know what sort of problems Excel introduces in these situations if you have time.
At the risk of pedantry.. 'cypher' is apparently a legitimate alternative spelling of the word, possibly another example of the 'separated by a common language' phenomenon.:)
with the size of hard drives now, a traveling employee could comfortably take a 1TB or more OTP with them on a business trip, more than enough to last for a couple of weeks.
That's a really interesting idea. I wonder if it wouldn't last for a bit longer if the OTP data on the drive was an index for a routine that generated a unique hash? Would that give it enough mileage to be able to reduce the size of the OTP data needed? Or would doing so weaken (or ruin) the pad's effectiveness?
Please forgive the ignorance of my questions, I have little more than a layman's understanding of cryptography.
It's stupid *and* barbaric. Even if it worked, I would reject it completely, as people who value morality and justice do.
Precisely, especially when considering that torture is just as likely to be used for punishment as it is for intelligence. Refusing to stoop to the use of torture of any kind is the only possible logical and moral outcome.
That mantra is no more insulting than you shouting from the rooftops that you're a woman when in fact you are not.
Great form, buddy: it's your Gaaahd-given right to punish someone with silly ad-hominen attacks when you disagree with them. Never mind that Barbara had an intelligent position and argument and got modded +5 for her efforts *for each post*, something the AC would be unlikely to achieve themselves.
Isn't Slashdot aimed at people who appreciate intellectualism and reasoned argument? Why does it also seem to attract unintelligent mud-slinging blowflies like this AC?
They aren't "discrediting" the intelligence of the general US public, they're showing the world just how stupid the general US public is. We are a bunch of morons.
Whilst I applaud your honesty and realism, as a Kiwi I feel it only fair to point out the US has no monopoly on stupidity. Sadly, we have no shortage of it here either.
Basically, the deniers will fuck everything up now, but leave the consequences to a generation or two below.
Oh, I'm far more optimistic than that. I reckon we'll still have plenty of time to lynch them.:)
I hope that we'll have the foresight to pass laws to liquidate their assets once they've been strung up by their livers. We'll need every bit of help we can get to mitigate the damage by the time AGW becomes impossible for the deniers to ignore.
I don't think your comment is flamebait regardless of whatever groupthink the mods are engaged in today. Stallman may be worthy of respect but IMHO he is not a desirable poster-child for F(L)OSS for many of the reasons you outline; that should be obvious to most of us. However - and more germane to the discussion - I think your comments regarding Linux's lack of progress on the Desktop are insightful although it's a little uncomfortable to have it boiled down so succinctly. I guess I must be in some mild form of denial about the software and my passion for seeing its usage spread.
I love Linux and use it everywhere, everywhere. Everywhere except the desktop, that is. Whilst I'm very out of date and I'm quite sure that things have since improved, I've been thoroughly turned off by Linux employed in anything other than a server or infrastructure role.
I've tried to love Linux on the desktop over many years and so far the love has been unrequited. I've been through the usual suspects (Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, CentOS and a couple of other distros from yesteryear) but have never managed to build a desktop environment that didn't piss me off or get in the way of doing useful work. Even with a nice OSS suite of Gimp, TB/FF, LibreOffice, etc., I experienced continual distractions from niggly little problems and found my general level of frustration to be higher than with Windows. Audio glitched out frequently. Updates broke stuff. Icons would disappear. Newly-installed software would commonly fail to create icons or shortcuts. Browser plugins would shit themselves regularly. There were of course days when everything was plain sailing but even then it felt a little precarious. I did spend a bit of money ensuring I had all my hardware right and in all honesty this did help, but not enough to change the feeling of general instability and the sensation of things being rough-around-the-edges. I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to the command line but even then I've had plenty of time sapped playing whack-a-mole with trivial annoyances.
Windows comes complete with its own Halls of Suck to traverse but MS have at least sorted out most of the stuff that really gets in the user's way. I honestly tried to move to Linux because I wanted to practice the FLOSS philosophy I preached, but Windows, to my chagrin, always re-emerged as the right tool for the job in my case. It should be mentioned for full disclosure that I managed to avoid Vista altogether, which goes a long way to explaining why my Windows experience has been reasonably good.
Maybe Linux is simply not suited to the mass-appeal desktop GUI market? I'd say with the phenomenal success of Android on various devices in production today, such a concession may not be such a hard one to make. It's no loss for FLOSS if there never is a Year of the Linux Desktop when we're squarely in an age of Linux on the Handheld.
she has discovered an opportunity (her ass) and exploited it.
I'm not sure I'd like to live her life the way she is
Well that's a reasonable argument but not completely different to my position that her exploitation of her own assets was stupid (she didn't need the money or the fame) and, as you point out, neither of us would be likely to do the same in her position.
I can't really suggest that her ass and boobs all over the place has actually affected my life for the worse.
Oh, I agree and I would 'defend to the death her right to make herself look ridiculous'. I would never seek to censor this sort of behaviour but I certainly intend to continue sneering at her for it.:-)
because she actually had to put up with Kanye for.. a considerable time.
[shudders] Good point, Kanye's probably like Kryptonite for intelligence - just add proximity and the IQ points start to slip away. May explain her sudden need to publish pictures of her fat arse all over the magazine stands of the world.
You sound like a one percenter, minus the assets. Maybe you could do something with your life instead of caring what Kim does.
Yeah, sorry, was a pretty grumpy post. Feeling the financial pressure rather keenly just now and Kim copped it a bit unnecessarily, apologies all round.
I'll also make a point to mod you down when I can be arsed to sign in. You have a foul mouth and act like a prick.
So sayeth the self-righteous arsehole who feels it appropriate to abuse his moderation privs as and when it suits him. Because he's offended, as is his right!
Here's to hope for a prosperous and very long life for each of us.
Your overall premise is absolutely correct from my point of view. The Human body is a technology - we'll figure it out eventually, given time.
The so-called Deep Learning phenomenon that appears to be snaking across the world may very well yield considerable insight, especially as we collectively come to terms with the 'big data' stuff
I must admit (and apologise) that I've been a bit angry in my last couple of posts. I'm really very concerned that this technology will have a terribly divisive effect, accelerating the divisions in our society. Life is sucking for more and more people, at least in my own experience. Stupidly I've been inarticulate and brutish when I could have been clear and heartfelt, sorry.
Arguably no technology is inherently good or bad. A nice philosophical idea, but we all know the truth: individual Humans err to 'good' whilst hierarchies of any stripe err to 'evil' and it is Hierarchy in its various forms that ultimately decides our quality of life.
Thanks so much for modding me down, I appreciate the punishment! How fucking dare I have an opinion that isn't entirely composed of dandelions and pot-pourri farted out of God's sweet-smelling arsehole? What a fucking ingrate I am! Thanks for putting me back in my place, O great seer of all that I am blind to! Now please excuse me as I get back to my joy-filled life where nothing bad ever happens and only trolls get modded down.
but one of the greatest things about the modern age is the considerable technlogically amplified pleasure(entertainment, learning, naked pics) that are available to everyone even if you're a slob working for 5 bucks a day in Asia.
A fair comment, I agree completely, and to be clear, I don't expect 100% leisure time or an age of work-less abundance. I'd just like to see everyone (myself included) continue to have a right to continue to earn a living. However the greed of the top percentage of our society will ensure this childish, fanciful and ridiculous dream of mine is unsustainable for the myself and most of our society. Western civilisation as we know it is returning on its unstoppable orbit, ultimately terminating in the embrace of serfdom. The Black Death was the only thing that allowed us to escape last time and then only at enormous cost.
Remember, as a '1-percenter' it's less about ensuring one wins, as that's already well-assured dear boy. More important is that everyone else loses! That's where the joy and the true victory lies!
May they find greatly-lengthened and considerable technologically-amplified pleasure in their lives while the remaining 99% of us scratch and grub for the barest minimum to achieve survival in this brave new world of post-scarcity possibilities.
I wish nothing but the best possible outcome for our obvious betters, those for whom life's problems amount to the tyrannical difficulty of deciding between thirteen hundred cases of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay or Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Ermitage Cuvee Cathelin when catering for their this week's offensively-ostentatious wedding or birthday party.
Yes, Kim Kardashian, you vile cunt, I'm looking at you (amongst others).
Slashdot Mirror
Excel is terrible at math and rounding, sure it's fine for small tasks but if you try to amortize a 30 year mortgage you will be off compared to any financial institutions calculations.
Wow, that's the first time I've ever read a complaint about Excel's math. Perhaps my memory is bad! I'm also surprised to read your comment about financial institutions, I guess I just assumed that's what they would use. Every company I've done work for has relied on Excel for most of their calculations. The odd client runs SAP but Excel has pride of place in my experience. For my own limited needs I find LibreOffice's Calc more than sufficient.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm quite interested to know what sort of problems Excel introduces in these situations if you have time.
Despite my misspelling of cipher.
At the risk of pedantry.. 'cypher' is apparently a legitimate alternative spelling of the word, possibly another example of the 'separated by a common language' phenomenon. :)
Ah, that makes sense. That is actually a very obvious implementation of a OTP, glad I didn't make any foolish statements of fact in my post!
Thanks, you've provided a keyphrase I can search on and educate myself with. :)
The resulting text wouldn't look like it's encrypted, it just isn't meaningful.
Would such an encrypted text still be recognized as encrypted, or would it be able to stay under government radar?
Unfortunately I suspect that even the untrained eye will be able to figure out that something is going on, even if they can't tell what exactly. :-p
with the size of hard drives now, a traveling employee could comfortably take a 1TB or more OTP with them on a business trip, more than enough to last for a couple of weeks.
That's a really interesting idea. I wonder if it wouldn't last for a bit longer if the OTP data on the drive was an index for a routine that generated a unique hash? Would that give it enough mileage to be able to reduce the size of the OTP data needed? Or would doing so weaken (or ruin) the pad's effectiveness?
Please forgive the ignorance of my questions, I have little more than a layman's understanding of cryptography.
It's stupid *and* barbaric. Even if it worked, I would reject it completely, as people who value morality and justice do.
Precisely, especially when considering that torture is just as likely to be used for punishment as it is for intelligence. Refusing to stoop to the use of torture of any kind is the only possible logical and moral outcome.
That mantra is no more insulting than you shouting from the rooftops that you're a woman when in fact you are not.
Great form, buddy: it's your Gaaahd-given right to punish someone with silly ad-hominen attacks when you disagree with them. Never mind that Barbara had an intelligent position and argument and got modded +5 for her efforts *for each post*, something the AC would be unlikely to achieve themselves.
Isn't Slashdot aimed at people who appreciate intellectualism and reasoned argument? Why does it also seem to attract unintelligent mud-slinging blowflies like this AC?
They aren't "discrediting" the intelligence of the general US public, they're showing the world just how stupid the general US public is. We are a bunch of morons.
Whilst I applaud your honesty and realism, as a Kiwi I feel it only fair to point out the US has no monopoly on stupidity. Sadly, we have no shortage of it here either.
Basically, the deniers will fuck everything up now, but leave the consequences to a generation or two below.
Oh, I'm far more optimistic than that. I reckon we'll still have plenty of time to lynch them. :)
I hope that we'll have the foresight to pass laws to liquidate their assets once they've been strung up by their livers. We'll need every bit of help we can get to mitigate the damage by the time AGW becomes impossible for the deniers to ignore.
Either shit or get off the pot, guys.
Smelly. The alternative is similarly unattractive as it may induce withdrawal. Better they just get on with graphene research instead.
I don't think your comment is flamebait regardless of whatever groupthink the mods are engaged in today. Stallman may be worthy of respect but IMHO he is not a desirable poster-child for F(L)OSS for many of the reasons you outline; that should be obvious to most of us. However - and more germane to the discussion - I think your comments regarding Linux's lack of progress on the Desktop are insightful although it's a little uncomfortable to have it boiled down so succinctly. I guess I must be in some mild form of denial about the software and my passion for seeing its usage spread.
I love Linux and use it everywhere, everywhere. Everywhere except the desktop, that is. Whilst I'm very out of date and I'm quite sure that things have since improved, I've been thoroughly turned off by Linux employed in anything other than a server or infrastructure role.
I've tried to love Linux on the desktop over many years and so far the love has been unrequited. I've been through the usual suspects (Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, CentOS and a couple of other distros from yesteryear) but have never managed to build a desktop environment that didn't piss me off or get in the way of doing useful work. Even with a nice OSS suite of Gimp, TB/FF, LibreOffice, etc., I experienced continual distractions from niggly little problems and found my general level of frustration to be higher than with Windows. Audio glitched out frequently. Updates broke stuff. Icons would disappear. Newly-installed software would commonly fail to create icons or shortcuts. Browser plugins would shit themselves regularly. There were of course days when everything was plain sailing but even then it felt a little precarious. I did spend a bit of money ensuring I had all my hardware right and in all honesty this did help, but not enough to change the feeling of general instability and the sensation of things being rough-around-the-edges. I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to the command line but even then I've had plenty of time sapped playing whack-a-mole with trivial annoyances.
Windows comes complete with its own Halls of Suck to traverse but MS have at least sorted out most of the stuff that really gets in the user's way. I honestly tried to move to Linux because I wanted to practice the FLOSS philosophy I preached, but Windows, to my chagrin, always re-emerged as the right tool for the job in my case. It should be mentioned for full disclosure that I managed to avoid Vista altogether, which goes a long way to explaining why my Windows experience has been reasonably good.
Maybe Linux is simply not suited to the mass-appeal desktop GUI market? I'd say with the phenomenal success of Android on various devices in production today, such a concession may not be such a hard one to make. It's no loss for FLOSS if there never is a Year of the Linux Desktop when we're squarely in an age of Linux on the Handheld.
she has discovered an opportunity (her ass) and exploited it.
I'm not sure I'd like to live her life the way she is
Well that's a reasonable argument but not completely different to my position that her exploitation of her own assets was stupid (she didn't need the money or the fame) and, as you point out, neither of us would be likely to do the same in her position.
I can't really suggest that her ass and boobs all over the place has actually affected my life for the worse.
Oh, I agree and I would 'defend to the death her right to make herself look ridiculous'. I would never seek to censor this sort of behaviour but I certainly intend to continue sneering at her for it. :-)
because she actually had to put up with Kanye for.. a considerable time.
[shudders] Good point, Kanye's probably like Kryptonite for intelligence - just add proximity and the IQ points start to slip away. May explain her sudden need to publish pictures of her fat arse all over the magazine stands of the world.
You sound like a one percenter, minus the assets. Maybe you could do something with your life instead of caring what Kim does.
Yeah, sorry, was a pretty grumpy post. Feeling the financial pressure rather keenly just now and Kim copped it a bit unnecessarily, apologies all round.
I'll also make a point to mod you down when I can be arsed to sign in. You have a foul mouth and act like a prick.
So sayeth the self-righteous arsehole who feels it appropriate to abuse his moderation privs as and when it suits him. Because he's offended, as is his right!
Here's to hope for a prosperous and very long life for each of us.
Your overall premise is absolutely correct from my point of view. The Human body is a technology - we'll figure it out eventually, given time.
The so-called Deep Learning phenomenon that appears to be snaking across the world may very well yield considerable insight, especially as we collectively come to terms with the 'big data' stuff
I must admit (and apologise) that I've been a bit angry in my last couple of posts. I'm really very concerned that this technology will have a terribly divisive effect, accelerating the divisions in our society. Life is sucking for more and more people, at least in my own experience. Stupidly I've been inarticulate and brutish when I could have been clear and heartfelt, sorry.
Arguably no technology is inherently good or bad. A nice philosophical idea, but we all know the truth: individual Humans err to 'good' whilst hierarchies of any stripe err to 'evil' and it is Hierarchy in its various forms that ultimately decides our quality of life.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for identifying yourself as one of the cuntholes who abuse their moderation privileges. Have a nice day. :-)
Will make a point to mod you down on sight. You have a foul mouth.
Well naturally, as a 'foul mouth' invalidates everything that person has to say. You religious by any chance?
Thanks so much for modding me down, I appreciate the punishment! How fucking dare I have an opinion that isn't entirely composed of dandelions and pot-pourri farted out of God's sweet-smelling arsehole? What a fucking ingrate I am! Thanks for putting me back in my place, O great seer of all that I am blind to! Now please excuse me as I get back to my joy-filled life where nothing bad ever happens and only trolls get modded down.
I don't know about you..
but one of the greatest things about the modern age is the considerable technlogically amplified pleasure(entertainment, learning, naked pics) that are available to everyone even if you're a slob working for 5 bucks a day in Asia.
A fair comment, I agree completely, and to be clear, I don't expect 100% leisure time or an age of work-less abundance. I'd just like to see everyone (myself included) continue to have a right to continue to earn a living. However the greed of the top percentage of our society will ensure this childish, fanciful and ridiculous dream of mine is unsustainable for the myself and most of our society. Western civilisation as we know it is returning on its unstoppable orbit, ultimately terminating in the embrace of serfdom. The Black Death was the only thing that allowed us to escape last time and then only at enormous cost.
Remember, as a '1-percenter' it's less about ensuring one wins, as that's already well-assured dear boy. More important is that everyone else loses! That's where the joy and the true victory lies!
Alternatively this will only be accessible to the Rupert Murdoch's of this world...
No alternative necessary. You are entirely correct; this is exactly how it will turn out.
Yay for us!
Telemeres - for now they look like imposing a pretty hard upper limit.
I pray to electronic Jebus you're right. I couldn't stand the idea of Paris Hilton or Brittany fucking Spears living another hundred years or so.
May they find greatly-lengthened and considerable technologically-amplified pleasure in their lives while the remaining 99% of us scratch and grub for the barest minimum to achieve survival in this brave new world of post-scarcity possibilities.
I wish nothing but the best possible outcome for our obvious betters, those for whom life's problems amount to the tyrannical difficulty of deciding between thirteen hundred cases of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay or Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Ermitage Cuvee Cathelin when catering for their this week's offensively-ostentatious wedding or birthday party.
Yes, Kim Kardashian, you vile cunt, I'm looking at you (amongst others).
Still your flapping jaws you muppet, his point is that it's another avenue to criminalise otherwise law-abiding citizens.