Damn them for not making their codebase absolutely perfect from day one! Software should spring into life fully formed, like Athena from Zeus' forehead!
Actually it should. It's not in vogue right at the moment but it's called testing BEFORE release. Do you really think for more critical stuff that the developers can afford to release untested crap and say "oh well it's beta"? Think of mission critical stuff - aircraft and spacecraft, power industry, telecommunications.
There's a reason "mission critical" software costs millions of dollars to develop and license. And there's a reason that free software, for which it's impractical to spends millions of dollars on development, has a few warts.
Nevermind the fact that a browser must be fresh -- if you don't support all the latest standards, you're useless; and if you do, then you are, necessarily, somewhat hastily developed.
You wouldn't *want* to use a browser developed to operate to "mission critical" standards. It'd have a feature set comparable to Lynx.
then, once the transfer clears, take all the money out except a token amount ($1) in cash, and then deposit the cash in your other account. Or close the account as you no longer need it.
This way, they can't undo the transaction and you've got the cash. Even if they try to reverse the transaction, the bank can't reverse it because you didn't use paper; if you took a bank check from them they could reverse the payment to your bank. Also you don't want to use the same bank as your own because they can use set off if the other side tries to renege on the transaction.
Frankly, from what I've read, what you're suggesting offers no protection whatsoever.
You're recommend having the check, transfer, etc. deposited in a new account at Bank A, withdrawing the funds in cash, and transferring them to Bank B -- your regular bank. My understanding is that, should the check bounce, Bank A would simply reverse the credit, leaving you with an overdraft -- regardless of whether the account had been "closed" (I've had this happen -- I closed an account, and had a debit against the account come through after the fact). They'd then send you a notice that you owe them money, and, should you fail to respond, send a collection agency after you. The bank certainly sent me an overdraft notice in my case. After talking to someone on the phone, I was able to get the overdraft fee reversed, since it had been their error that lead to the debit on that account. I had to transfer funds to cover the debit itself, however....I mean, really, if your scheme worked, what would prevent scammers from using the exact same plan to intentionally deposit bad checks, and withdraw cash?
...I unmute and ask him to verify his account password for security purposes.
You could almost hear him tense up. When he starts stuttering, I was sure he never stopped to consider that he might have someone
"Ummm, uh, it's fuckyou2dickhead."...
I actually intentionally chose a password like that once. I was writing some really basic RuneScape macros (god that game is a clickfest -- it takes literally millions of mouse clicks to advance a single skill to the highest level), one of which logged me in to the game.
Once, I accidentally triggered that macro while I was already logged in. I looked on in horror as my character spoke my username and password in public chat.
I wondered how I could prevent that from happening again, without terribly complicating my macro. Then it dawned on me -- runescape has a pretty aggressive profanity filter (fun fact: "geocities" was on their filtered word list at the time -- as was "macro").
So I constructed a new password entirely out of obscenities. So, on the occasions when that macro fired while logged in, people just saw:
Just stick them on an Archival Gold CD, and in 25 years post this to Slashdot:
"I've been tasked with finding a way to read digitally stored photographs buried in a small underground time capsule 25 years ago. It looks like they used a steel vessel, welded closed..."
Well, shit, if he can count on/. still being here in 25 years...
Just post the whole of the data, tar'd and base64 encoded, in this thread. You can probably even con a few people into modding you up to +5.
Store the URL.
Bonus points: several other posters follow suit, and post huge, base64 encoded tars of goatse.
I hope your client is prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover data from these devices.
Imagine what it'd cost to get data recovered from 25 year old media today (even recovering data from a drive that's suffered a head crash yesterday is pricey). Most hard disks that old are totally obsolete; CDs break down; flash loses state without refreshes; batteries fail.
You could conceivably have a USB PROM device designed, but I have no idea if anyone actually sells these.
I block google analytics because I see no difference between their spying on me and any other advertiser spying on me. Seriously, how did we get to the point where everyone thinks its A-OK for google to spy, but no other advertiser?
I can tell you, as a developer, why we use Google Analytics on our site.
They have, hands down, the best free web analytics software out there. And we want analytics software, because without it, it's hard to tell what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong.
We use google analytics to help us make our sites more useful for you.
I don't think that's enough to declare that Google has lost its mojo. Think of how many times Apple was "dying" according to the press. I think this author is just bored with Google and wants to cause a stir.
Forgive me if I'm misinformed, but as I recall, apple *was* dying at one point, in the pre-iTunes/iPod/OS X days. In 1997, they accepted a $150 million investment from Microsoft, and their stock price was at a 10-year low. They are where they are today only because of an amazing turnaround.
That being said, google is by no means the Apple of 1997.
If someone was going to destroy a 2.3 kilometer structure in its entirety, the similar action taken on a street corner outside in any major city would have a similar effect.
Except, as TFA proudly points out, the population density is 10 times higher than an equivalent city.
So a "similar action taken on a street corner outside in any major city" would have 1/10th the effect.
right up till... Someone crashes a A340F full of explosives into it. Or sets fires in it, or... Well you get the idea. Good idea but a great target.
I just saw the NOVA episode about NIST's report on the WTC collapse.
One interesting fact they mentioned: in the event of a disaster, sky scrapers are not designed to be evacuated. There isn't enough room in the stairwells to get thousands of people down dozens of floors in a timely fashion.
In the event of fire, people are supposed to generally stay in place, while a few floors near the fire are evacuated. Fire is then fought in place on the effected floors.
If it's not possible to get a few thousand people out of the WTC in an hour or two, then there's no way you'll ever evacuate a million people from a single building.
Can somebody please explain to me what the hell a "mainframe" is/was for and why it might be dead?
On a raw price per processor basis, commodity hardware is several orders of magnitude cheaper than mainframes.
Say you have a million dollar budget. You can buy 1 low end mainframe, or 50-100 high-end commodity servers at $10-20k each. The commodity servers will have far more number crunching power, as a whole. Your average novice engineer is more familiar with the software and hardware, since it's not much different from their workstations. And you can build up slowly, buying servers a handful at a time, as needed. With a mainframe, your initial outlay for a starting business is much larger. And scaling up a single mainframe gets exponentially more expensive; the price buying more commodity servers stays constant, meaning a linear cost of scaling.
At least, that's the theory. There is some practical examples of it at work -- every big website is run on commodity hardware; digg, slashdot, yahoo, google, facebook... None of 'em are running on mainframes, but their clusters handle incredibly large workloads.
If money is no object (e.g., you're Exxon, or a credit card company), mainframes are a lot more appealing.
If you want to start the next big.com in your garage, mainframes are out of the question.
Oh, sweet irony! Since Seinfeld always had a Mac on his desk in his show. In fact, if you look closely he had the latest model new Mac every year.
Honestly, if you think about it, it's not that ironic.
Apple paid him for product placement in the 90's. Microsoft pays him for some ads in the 00's.
Apparently, the man is not averse to being paid to pimp computers/software. And he doesn't really care *who* the money's coming from. Can't say I blame him.
There's one thing driving the "browser-as-a-ui" movement:
The browser is a flexible, universal client application that's already installed everywhere. There's no other platform that allows such easy access to decently-sandboxed networked applications with such a wide install base.
With a single click, people can nearly-instantly start using your application, and be reasonably certain that they're protected from your application doing anything terribly malicious. Nowhere else is the barrier to entry so low.
terrible all around macbook quality (mine's 1.5 years old and literally falling to pieces, including the graphics unit)
Funny, I beat the *shit* out of my laptops, and my MacBook is no worse for wear after 18 months. The last two HPs I owned, however, only lasted 12 months each. I'd love to see what you would have done with them...
How does a "graphics unit" "litterally fall to pieces" anyway?
I wanted to talk for a second about some of the unique mechanics I noticed, which you might have already heard about before. The archmage I'm playing has a mechanic known as high magic, which the shaman also has, but it's called Waagh!. Basically, how it works is like this: If you cast damage spells, your healing counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each damage spell you cast. If you cast healing spells, your damage counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each healing spell you cast. This counter is like a charge that can be saved, but if you stop casting spells for 10 or 15 seconds you lose all the charges you have. If you cast a bunch of damage spells and build your counter up to 5, your next healing spell that normally would take 3 seconds to cast will be instant, and will heal for more. Likewise, if you build your healing counter up to 5, your next damage spell will hit harder. This unique dynamic encourages people to not just be healbots, but to be in the fray of battle, dishing out damage, and tossing out heals constantly. Every class has a similar unique mechanic, which will be refreshing for those of you used to filling a simple role (like healbot).
Sounds an awful lot like the way rogues (combo points)/warriors (rage) work in WoW.
And I'm sure WoW borrowed those mechanics from another game as well. There's an awful lot of "borrowing" in the MMO industry.
Suppose that events in a virtual world were transactional and were logged to a change log, ala a DBMS system. Suppose further that you could rollback the state of the virtual world to a known point in time, apply a different transaction, and then replay the remainder of the transaction log.
The interesting component of history and time travel is not logged in transaction logs, and that's choice.
You're essentially asking, "What if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1938... and then everyone made exactly the same choices, regardless?"
The idea of simulating time travel is interesting, but it's critical that you then also simulate each actor's decision making process.
It boggles the mind why anyone would want a low to mid range laptop to come with Vista preinstalled. And yet that's the only way to get them (reasonably).
That's why I bought a macbook instead.
That, and having two HP laptops die within 12 months of their original purchase dates.
Whoever gets to follow the orders carries part of the blame, you can not be absolved for killing an innocent person by claiming to simply be doing your job, that sort of excuse went out the window a long long time ago, and for a very good reason.
The hand that pulls the trigger is connected to an arm that is connected to a brain, that is supposed to think for itself, not to blindly follow orders, especially not if they're coming from a group of people that have been known to err before.
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.-- Stanley Milgram, 1974
Read up on the work of Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo. Research indicates that the desire to obey will drive most people to do things they would otherwise consider to be absolutely wrong.
We're trained from an early age to do what ever teacher, mommy, and daddy tell us, regardless of our own desires -- because they know best. That training carries over into adulthood.
Understanding that, it's hard to place the blame entirely on either the one giving the orders, or the one carrying them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Good software takes 10 years to write.
There's a reason "mission critical" software costs millions of dollars to develop and license. And there's a reason that free software, for which it's impractical to spends millions of dollars on development, has a few warts.
Nevermind the fact that a browser must be fresh -- if you don't support all the latest standards, you're useless; and if you do, then you are, necessarily, somewhat hastily developed.
You wouldn't *want* to use a browser developed to operate to "mission critical" standards. It'd have a feature set comparable to Lynx.
Their current chip is basically a pentium 3, without the x86 instruction set. It comes in 500 mhz to 1.2 ghz flavors.
They're even less of a threat than Via and Cyrix were.
Frankly, from what I've read, what you're suggesting offers no protection whatsoever.
You're recommend having the check, transfer, etc. deposited in a new account at Bank A, withdrawing the funds in cash, and transferring them to Bank B -- your regular bank. My understanding is that, should the check bounce, Bank A would simply reverse the credit, leaving you with an overdraft -- regardless of whether the account had been "closed" (I've had this happen -- I closed an account, and had a debit against the account come through after the fact). They'd then send you a notice that you owe them money, and, should you fail to respond, send a collection agency after you. The bank certainly sent me an overdraft notice in my case. After talking to someone on the phone, I was able to get the overdraft fee reversed, since it had been their error that lead to the debit on that account. I had to transfer funds to cover the debit itself, however. ...I mean, really, if your scheme worked, what would prevent scammers from using the exact same plan to intentionally deposit bad checks, and withdraw cash?
What can I say? Is our children learning grammar? If not, it's probably thanks to Laxative enforcement policies.
Thanks, Washington. Between the patriot act and the DMCA, you've managed to legislate one of the few booming industries we had out of the country.
Used to be, there were four things we did better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery
You're really trying to cross things off that list as fast as you can, aren't you?
I actually intentionally chose a password like that once. I was writing some really basic RuneScape macros (god that game is a clickfest -- it takes literally millions of mouse clicks to advance a single skill to the highest level), one of which logged me in to the game.
Once, I accidentally triggered that macro while I was already logged in. I looked on in horror as my character spoke my username and password in public chat.
I wondered how I could prevent that from happening again, without terribly complicating my macro. Then it dawned on me -- runescape has a pretty aggressive profanity filter (fun fact: "geocities" was on their filtered word list at the time -- as was "macro").
So I constructed a new password entirely out of obscenities. So, on the occasions when that macro fired while logged in, people just saw:
merreborn says, "merreborn"
merreborn says, "*******"
I don't want to make you an escape goat, but I believe the word you were looking for was "undue"
Well, shit, if he can count on /. still being here in 25 years...
Just post the whole of the data, tar'd and base64 encoded, in this thread. You can probably even con a few people into modding you up to +5.
Store the URL.
Bonus points: several other posters follow suit, and post huge, base64 encoded tars of goatse.
I hope your client is prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars to recover data from these devices.
Imagine what it'd cost to get data recovered from 25 year old media today (even recovering data from a drive that's suffered a head crash yesterday is pricey). Most hard disks that old are totally obsolete; CDs break down; flash loses state without refreshes; batteries fail.
You could conceivably have a USB PROM device designed, but I have no idea if anyone actually sells these.
You don't need google's cache, or any specific browser. The answers are always at the very bottom of the page (below a huge, fake 'footer').
Throw 'em all in a bucket with a hole in the top, and a power strip inside. Here's an instructable:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Vintage-Minnow-Bucket-Charging-Station/
I can tell you, as a developer, why we use Google Analytics on our site.
They have, hands down, the best free web analytics software out there. And we want analytics software, because without it, it's hard to tell what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong.
We use google analytics to help us make our sites more useful for you.
Forgive me if I'm misinformed, but as I recall, apple *was* dying at one point, in the pre-iTunes/iPod/OS X days. In 1997, they accepted a $150 million investment from Microsoft, and their stock price was at a 10-year low. They are where they are today only because of an amazing turnaround.
That being said, google is by no means the Apple of 1997.
Except, as TFA proudly points out, the population density is 10 times higher than an equivalent city.
So a "similar action taken on a street corner outside in any major city" would have 1/10th the effect.
I just saw the NOVA episode about NIST's report on the WTC collapse.
One interesting fact they mentioned: in the event of a disaster, sky scrapers are not designed to be evacuated. There isn't enough room in the stairwells to get thousands of people down dozens of floors in a timely fashion.
In the event of fire, people are supposed to generally stay in place, while a few floors near the fire are evacuated. Fire is then fought in place on the effected floors.
If it's not possible to get a few thousand people out of the WTC in an hour or two, then there's no way you'll ever evacuate a million people from a single building.
On a raw price per processor basis, commodity hardware is several orders of magnitude cheaper than mainframes.
Say you have a million dollar budget. You can buy 1 low end mainframe, or 50-100 high-end commodity servers at $10-20k each. The commodity servers will have far more number crunching power, as a whole. Your average novice engineer is more familiar with the software and hardware, since it's not much different from their workstations. And you can build up slowly, buying servers a handful at a time, as needed. With a mainframe, your initial outlay for a starting business is much larger. And scaling up a single mainframe gets exponentially more expensive; the price buying more commodity servers stays constant, meaning a linear cost of scaling.
At least, that's the theory. There is some practical examples of it at work -- every big website is run on commodity hardware; digg, slashdot, yahoo, google, facebook... None of 'em are running on mainframes, but their clusters handle incredibly large workloads.
If money is no object (e.g., you're Exxon, or a credit card company), mainframes are a lot more appealing.
If you want to start the next big .com in your garage, mainframes are out of the question.
Honestly, if you think about it, it's not that ironic.
Apple paid him for product placement in the 90's.
Microsoft pays him for some ads in the 00's.
Apparently, the man is not averse to being paid to pimp computers/software. And he doesn't really care *who* the money's coming from. Can't say I blame him.
There's one thing driving the "browser-as-a-ui" movement:
The browser is a flexible, universal client application that's already installed everywhere. There's no other platform that allows such easy access to decently-sandboxed networked applications with such a wide install base.
With a single click, people can nearly-instantly start using your application, and be reasonably certain that they're protected from your application doing anything terribly malicious. Nowhere else is the barrier to entry so low.
Funny, I beat the *shit* out of my laptops, and my MacBook is no worse for wear after 18 months. The last two HPs I owned, however, only lasted 12 months each. I'd love to see what you would have done with them...
How does a "graphics unit" "litterally fall to pieces" anyway?
Sounds an awful lot like the way rogues (combo points)/warriors (rage) work in WoW.
And I'm sure WoW borrowed those mechanics from another game as well. There's an awful lot of "borrowing" in the MMO industry.
It's been over 18 months. Everything still works great. These things are really well built, unlike your average $1100 laptop.
The interesting component of history and time travel is not logged in transaction logs, and that's choice.
You're essentially asking, "What if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1938... and then everyone made exactly the same choices, regardless?"
The idea of simulating time travel is interesting, but it's critical that you then also simulate each actor's decision making process.
That's why I bought a macbook instead.
That, and having two HP laptops die within 12 months of their original purchase dates.
Don't underestimate the power of the desire to obey:
Read up on the work of Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo. Research indicates that the desire to obey will drive most people to do things they would otherwise consider to be absolutely wrong.
We're trained from an early age to do what ever teacher, mommy, and daddy tell us, regardless of our own desires -- because they know best. That training carries over into adulthood.
Understanding that, it's hard to place the blame entirely on either the one giving the orders, or the one carrying them out.
IIRC, after you've lost a few, they start charging you for each one you "lose", but refund you if you find 'em and send 'em back later.