Your mother in law is obviously proof of the Young Earth Theory of Creation Sciense, which posits that humans and dynosaurs (in this case, pterosaurs) were on the Earth at the same time.
"It's certainly more secure than IE, but is it secure *enough*? No, it isn't."
What I think you mean is that while Firefox is more secure than IE, that added security doesn't make up for IE's convenience factors: WindowsUpdate, comes with Windows.
What about this: it's a better browser.
Or this: no popups, no spyware.
"Five updates later, I'm explaining to my manager that Firefox, just like IE, is full of security holes that need to be patched."
How about saying, "Firefox needs to be updated." Why is it necessary to say that Firefox (or IE) is "full of security holes"? It makes you sound whiny and unprofessional to make negative generalzations about the software you support.
The very phrase "security holes" makes my teeth grind. Say, "IE is the primary way spyware gets installed, because of its policy of allowing execution of untrusted programs."
As for whether regularly scheduled updates are better than updates when needed, I think you'll find it hard to justify that when your users get hit by some piece of malware that will be fixed in a patch that's due out, on average, in two weeks.
I suggest you keep a log of when you apply patches (to FF or IE), and how much time it costs you. Since IE is part of the OS, you have to keep it patched even when FF is the default browser. Try to integrate the log into your daily timekeeping system, if you have one. Note how much user interruption there is, such as whether you have to reboot after a particular patch.
When you have a few months of data, I am certain you'll be able to justify Firefox as a more robust and secure browser than IE.
Look, I recognized and gave VP Gore credit for his contributions. It does no good to claim that he never said it, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due. He was running for President. It's natural that he would try to put his accomplishments in the best light. He just went a hair too far.
BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.
Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?
GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
The Internet was already being formed when Congressman Gore got involved. Even before the ARPANet protocols gave way to TCP/IP, there were gateways routing mail and news to BBS networks. There were UUCP connections all over the place. There were already inter-network connections, and the growth rate was exponential. It was happening, regardless of any single person's efforts.
That's why he was wrong to use the word "creating". He could have said "funding", "spreading", "growing", or even "sponsoring", and no one would have blinked an eye. I remember the late '80s and early '90s, when Mr. Gore was known as the driver of Internet expansion in government. But he was grabbing for credit in 1999, and he got called on it.
Purely unintentionally, it's the first actually funny Gore/Internet joke...
I agree with that so far
... made since the original Repub exaggeration.
The only exaggeration was Gore's, claiming that he took "legislative initiative in creating the Internet." He had a part, he showed leadership and vision, and deserves credit for that. But he implied, while trying to get elected President, that he was responsible for the creation of the Internet, when what he did was recognize its importance and apply tax dollars.
For a while, he was the loudest, if not the only, voice at the Federal level saying that the Internet needed funding. But create the Internet? Get real.
There are doubtless folks at ICANN who hope that the new Iraq-CAN'T. Those folks would doubtless like to avoid legitimizing the Iraqi governement, with the only little power they have, awarding domains.
Also, recall the flap over the USA keeping control over the root servers? Not awarding the.iq TLD to Iraq is a little dig at George Bush. They know they have to do it eventually, unless the terrorists and factions manage to destabilize the new government.
Bureaucrats also hate to make a mistake.
They appear to have realized finally that they were for no good reason failing to perform their primary function.
This is not a Mac versus Windows thing, so don't go putting that into the discussion. We all need to pull together during this crisis. 2008 is right around the corner, after all.
And there is no proof, none whatsoever, that the President ordered the IE6-only policy. I'm sure people expect him to make that kind of high-level decision, but Condie never delegated that to him. FEMA's part of Homeland Security, not State, so she doesn't give it the kind of attention that it deserves.
Back in the late 90's there were swarms of minor earthquakes around the Long Valley Caldera,
After going dormant, it changed its name to the Long Valley SCO Group. Then it started suing all the other volcanos for emitting greenhouse gases, which its predecessor in interest, Mt. St. Helens, invented.
Please try to get your facts straight next time, ok?
Cap is less a superhero than a super hero, if you'll pardon the wordplay. His strongest "power" is leadership. His only weapon is a defensive one. He acquired his combat skills fighting in a land war that makes Iraq look like a couple of kids on a playground. His work ethic is unmatched.
Captain America symbolizes what any one of us could become, if we persevere.
I was looking at my 42-year-old body the other day, and recalled a Captain America snippet from a 1970's Avengers comic. It showed Cap working out, tirelessly preparing himself for whatever lay ahead. That thought motivates me to work on self-improvement, since you never know what's coming at you next.
Just hope this won't immediatly swing the issues of legal abortion and religious coersion too far to the right when all is said and done. Right wing judges aren't insane, but they are at least as activist on their core issues.
Sigh. Since Rehnquist was a conservative, replacing him with another conservative won't change the balance of the Court.
"Activist" judges create law by their decisions. OTOH, most judges want to try the case in front of them, or even better, to have the parties settle. That is as it should be. The courts should be trying to make themselves unnecessary.
Judges usually don't want to find anything "new".
Conservative judges are typically "constructionists", meaning that they tend to view the law through the lens of authority. The Constitution, common law, statutory law, established case law are their authority, and their job is to make the system internally consistent.
Activist judges see their job as a means of achieving justice, regardless of what the current law is, whatever its source. And they think they know "justice" better than anyone else does. They think their job is to make the system consistent with external reality, not necessarily with past legal precedent.
Besides, Justices often don't behave the way they're expected to. I imagine it is a profound experience to become a USSC Justice, freeing one from any need to toe a party line. Also, in lower courts judges are primarily trying cases, while at the SCOTUS level they're primarily judging the law. Since they are judging both the merits of a case and the laws under which the case is being argued, it's hard to say how a particular Justice will rule on a case. A judge's track record and even any views expressed before being appointed to the Court are not necessarily predictive.
when you just learn from experience and only from experience, you miss a lot of very important things that are not 'in-front-of-you' obvious.
I've got a BS in CS. After about 15 years doing computer support and system administration for everything from IBM mainframes to Apple II's, I decided I to get certified. I'm really a Unix guy, but I try to be OS-agnostic. I decided to get the MCSE, since it was the most buzzworthy for my employer (who was paying for it).
I picked up the Exam Cram series covering the MCSE test. I studied the material, took the tests, and got my certification.
My experience level helped a lot, limiting the amount of truly new stuff I had to learn. Still, the process smoothed out a lot of rough edges in my skill set, and forced me to explore areas of (in this case) Windows that I otherwise would not have explored.
That thoroughness is why people should want to be certified. You can have experience, but without some formal training you aren't leveraging yourself well at all.
Long term? Who gives a rat's ass about long term! I'm telling someone on Slashdot who hasn't had a night's sleep in forever how he can get one without paying an arm and a leg.
This guy didn't complain about his sleep quality, just that he couldn't get any.
Alcohol prevents you from reaching the deepest levels of sleep
He's talking about not sleeping at all, or an hour or two a night. A lot of insomnia is in your head. He just might need that little something to relax and forget about not being able to sleep.
Not trying something because it's not perfect is a sure way to fail. Alcohol changes the mood, relieves tension, and can make some people very sleepy. The stimulant effect is overrated, about like eating ice cream before bed.
Self-hypnosis also can work, and as far as I know it's free of side effects.
Get comfortable.
Breath slowly.
Close your eyes, with eyes looking slightly up inside the lids
Start at 1000 and silently count slowly backwards. Allow your counting, breathing, and heartbeats to become rhythmic.
Driving is freedom. What you seem to advocate is giving up all the rest of the control we have. If all cars are robotically driven, it will take about six seconds for the government to mandate where they can and can't go - for your safety.
People seem so willing to give up freedom in exchange for safety. Seat belts. Helmets. Speed limits. Astronauts, the modern epitome of risk-taking adventurer, now have to be kept perfectly safe, even.
Tyranny is looking less and less like Big Brother and more and more like Big Mother.
but the other side of the coin, using DNA primitives to build things that are really new, is not yet viable (as I understand it). It's not "life" in that it can't reproduce. It's still highly valuable stuff, if it can do math or if it makes great rubber cement.
"Creating life" is taking Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Sodium, Chlorine, Phosphorus, etc. and turning that into cells which reproduce.
Personally, I think this is just a pork-barrel project for some congresscritter. You can see it right there in RTFA, sandwiched between the lines about the hams and all the bread the profit-hungry power companies think they'll make once BPL really gets cooking. Not content with my $200/month, they want to hog the ISP market, too.
My car produces optimum power between 3-4000 rpms the speed that I am going is dependent on the gear I have selected (6 on offer). From a purely environmental point of view I should be travelling in that rev range in the highest gear possible.
Your fuel economy is best when your engine turns at the lowest rpm it can operate in your highest gear. Optimum power is basically irrelevant as far as fuel economy goes.
To keep moving, your car has to fight its internal friction, tire friction and deformation, and the wind resistance. Of those, internal friction is mostly a constant, tire resistance is mostly linear, and wind resistance is cubic. That is, roughly speaking, F = AV^3, or Force = (total surface Area) X (velocity cubed). At highway speeds, velocity is all that matters.
The actual formula is more complicated, using the integral of the change in the angle your car forces air to take as it passes over each area times that area, but it's dominated by your car's profile and the velocity.
Changing from velocity (x) to velocity (x - 5) near the speed limit results in about a 3% fuel savings.
Me, I just like to drive fast sometimes. If you do, too, don't kid yourself that it's for your engine's sake.
In my 50-node-and-smaller networks, it's just so much nicer to be able to install the OS on the machines and not have to mess with licensing. I think that goodness would be that much sweeter on a 500-node network.
They could have used *BSD, but that would have been like Harvard boys using Yale locks. A bunch of Stanford grads use Berkeley-derived stuff? Get real:-).
I'm pretty sure it will never be the rage, but I like Programming Language Oriented Programming for difficult problems that don't seem doable in C/++ or something similar.
Most programs can be written practally in most languages, since all you really need is "if", "decrement" and "goto". Some problems aren't a good fit for a given language. That's why there's more than one.
Any program that breaks its problem into chunks is in effect creating its own mini-language. Whether you call it Abstact Data Typing or Object Orientation or Functional Programming or even Top Down Design, what it comes down to is dividing the problem into manageable chunks and working with those chunks until done.
I wish all CS students were taught from day one, or maybe day fifteen, how to create their own programming language. Usually you have to take a compilers course to get that.
Creating a new language is not that hard. It gets a bad rap because people think they have to write a backend for a given architecture, but writing the backend to generate C++ or some other HLL is just as good, since they've already done the heavy lifting and you can automate the compile train with your favorite maker.
I've been going to auctions and estate sales, picking them up for a few bucks a crate. Got about 1500 so far. There's a lot of Montavani and polka stuff, but every once in a while something really interesting, like some old jazz or blues will show up.
The good ones I clean up using a damp microfiber cloth, then convert to digital.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mother in law is obviously proof of the Young Earth Theory of Creation Sciense, which posits that humans and dynosaurs (in this case, pterosaurs) were on the Earth at the same time.
http://www.occultopedia.com/h/harpy.htm
I've got an ex-wife like that. I still have nightmares.
That story made my eyes glaze over faster than technical analysis of the stock market. I'm just not an astronomy nerd, I guess.
So there are rocks in space. And they follow the rules of Newtonian mechanics, rotating around one another.
G'night.
"It's certainly more secure than IE, but is it secure *enough*? No, it isn't."
What I think you mean is that while Firefox is more secure than IE, that added security doesn't make up for IE's convenience factors: WindowsUpdate, comes with Windows.
What about this: it's a better browser.
Or this: no popups, no spyware.
"Five updates later, I'm explaining to my manager that Firefox, just like IE, is full of security holes that need to be patched."
How about saying, "Firefox needs to be updated." Why is it necessary to say that Firefox (or IE) is "full of security holes"? It makes you sound whiny and unprofessional to make negative generalzations about the software you support.
The very phrase "security holes" makes my teeth grind. Say, "IE is the primary way spyware gets installed, because of its policy of allowing execution of untrusted programs."
As for whether regularly scheduled updates are better than updates when needed, I think you'll find it hard to justify that when your users get hit by some piece of malware that will be fixed in a patch that's due out, on average, in two weeks.
I suggest you keep a log of when you apply patches (to FF or IE), and how much time it costs you. Since IE is part of the OS, you have to keep it patched even when FF is the default browser. Try to integrate the log into your daily timekeeping system, if you have one. Note how much user interruption there is, such as whether you have to reboot after a particular patch.
When you have a few months of data, I am certain you'll be able to justify Firefox as a more robust and secure browser than IE.
He said, in a 1999 CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer,
The Internet was already being formed when Congressman Gore got involved. Even before the ARPANet protocols gave way to TCP/IP, there were gateways routing mail and news to BBS networks. There were UUCP connections all over the place. There were already inter-network connections, and the growth rate was exponential. It was happening, regardless of any single person's efforts.
That's why he was wrong to use the word "creating". He could have said "funding", "spreading", "growing", or even "sponsoring", and no one would have blinked an eye. I remember the late '80s and early '90s, when Mr. Gore was known as the driver of Internet expansion in government. But he was grabbing for credit in 1999, and he got called on it.
The only exaggeration was Gore's, claiming that he took "legislative initiative in creating the Internet." He had a part, he showed leadership and vision, and deserves credit for that. But he implied, while trying to get elected President, that he was responsible for the creation of the Internet, when what he did was recognize its importance and apply tax dollars.
For a while, he was the loudest, if not the only, voice at the Federal level saying that the Internet needed funding. But create the Internet? Get real.
There are doubtless folks at ICANN who hope that the new Iraq-CAN'T. Those folks would doubtless like to avoid legitimizing the Iraqi governement, with the only little power they have, awarding domains.
.iq TLD to Iraq is a little dig at George Bush. They know they have to do it eventually, unless the terrorists and factions manage to destabilize the new government.
Also, recall the flap over the USA keeping control over the root servers? Not awarding the
Bureaucrats also hate to make a mistake.
They appear to have realized finally that they were for no good reason failing to perform their primary function.
"George Bush doesn't care about Mac people!"
This is not a Mac versus Windows thing, so don't go putting that into the discussion. We all need to pull together during this crisis. 2008 is right around the corner, after all.
And there is no proof, none whatsoever, that the President ordered the IE6-only policy. I'm sure people expect him to make that kind of high-level decision, but Condie never delegated that to him. FEMA's part of Homeland Security, not State, so she doesn't give it the kind of attention that it deserves.
Besides, I hear she's a Mac user.
After going dormant, it changed its name to the Long Valley SCO Group. Then it started suing all the other volcanos for emitting greenhouse gases, which its predecessor in interest, Mt. St. Helens, invented.
Please try to get your facts straight next time, ok?
I live in a small town in Illinois, USA. I make about $50k, after expenses.
But my kids walk to school, I don't lock my doors even when no one is home, and I can breathe the air.
Life's ok.
Cap is less a superhero than a super hero, if you'll pardon the wordplay. His strongest "power" is leadership. His only weapon is a defensive one. He acquired his combat skills fighting in a land war that makes Iraq look like a couple of kids on a playground. His work ethic is unmatched.
Captain America symbolizes what any one of us could become, if we persevere.
I was looking at my 42-year-old body the other day, and recalled a Captain America snippet from a 1970's Avengers comic. It showed Cap working out, tirelessly preparing himself for whatever lay ahead. That thought motivates me to work on self-improvement, since you never know what's coming at you next.
Sigh. Since Rehnquist was a conservative, replacing him with another conservative won't change the balance of the Court.
"Activist" judges create law by their decisions. OTOH, most judges want to try the case in front of them, or even better, to have the parties settle. That is as it should be. The courts should be trying to make themselves unnecessary. Judges usually don't want to find anything "new".
Conservative judges are typically "constructionists", meaning that they tend to view the law through the lens of authority. The Constitution, common law, statutory law, established case law are their authority, and their job is to make the system internally consistent.
Activist judges see their job as a means of achieving justice, regardless of what the current law is, whatever its source. And they think they know "justice" better than anyone else does. They think their job is to make the system consistent with external reality, not necessarily with past legal precedent.
Besides, Justices often don't behave the way they're expected to. I imagine it is a profound experience to become a USSC Justice, freeing one from any need to toe a party line. Also, in lower courts judges are primarily trying cases, while at the SCOTUS level they're primarily judging the law. Since they are judging both the merits of a case and the laws under which the case is being argued, it's hard to say how a particular Justice will rule on a case. A judge's track record and even any views expressed before being appointed to the Court are not necessarily predictive.
MS-BASIC... BASIC ported to 8080.
MS-DOS... CP/M-86 with IBM patches.
Xenix... Unix ported to 8086
Windows... Oh, a GUI.
Windows NT... VMS with a GUI
The list goes on.
when you just learn from experience and only from experience, you miss a lot of very important things that are not 'in-front-of-you' obvious.
I've got a BS in CS. After about 15 years doing computer support and system administration for everything from IBM mainframes to Apple II's, I decided I to get certified. I'm really a Unix guy, but I try to be OS-agnostic. I decided to get the MCSE, since it was the most buzzworthy for my employer (who was paying for it).
I picked up the Exam Cram series covering the MCSE test. I studied the material, took the tests, and got my certification.
My experience level helped a lot, limiting the amount of truly new stuff I had to learn. Still, the process smoothed out a lot of rough edges in my skill set, and forced me to explore areas of (in this case) Windows that I otherwise would not have explored.
That thoroughness is why people should want to be certified. You can have experience, but without some formal training you aren't leveraging yourself well at all.
"Yer criminals are mostly stupid."
You didn't like TNG or DSN, but did like Voyager?
Face it: you're not a nerd. You just like looking at Jeri.
Long term? Who gives a rat's ass about long term! I'm telling someone on Slashdot who hasn't had a night's sleep in forever how he can get one without paying an arm and a leg.
This guy didn't complain about his sleep quality, just that he couldn't get any.
Off my back, Ahole.
He's talking about not sleeping at all, or an hour or two a night. A lot of insomnia is in your head. He just might need that little something to relax and forget about not being able to sleep.
Not trying something because it's not perfect is a sure way to fail. Alcohol changes the mood, relieves tension, and can make some people very sleepy. The stimulant effect is overrated, about like eating ice cream before bed.
Self-hypnosis also can work, and as far as I know it's free of side effects.
Driving is freedom. What you seem to advocate is giving up all the rest of the control we have. If all cars are robotically driven, it will take about six seconds for the government to mandate where they can and can't go - for your safety.
People seem so willing to give up freedom in exchange for safety. Seat belts. Helmets. Speed limits. Astronauts, the modern epitome of risk-taking adventurer, now have to be kept perfectly safe, even.
Tyranny is looking less and less like Big Brother and more and more like Big Mother.
but the other side of the coin, using DNA primitives to build things that are really new, is not yet viable (as I understand it). It's not "life" in that it can't reproduce. It's still highly valuable stuff, if it can do math or if it makes great rubber cement.
"Creating life" is taking Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Sodium, Chlorine, Phosphorus, etc. and turning that into cells which reproduce.
... you have a leg up on the situation.
Personally, I think this is just a pork-barrel project for some congresscritter. You can see it right there in RTFA, sandwiched between the lines about the hams and all the bread the profit-hungry power companies think they'll make once BPL really gets cooking. Not content with my $200/month, they want to hog the ISP market, too.
Really, I don't care beans about it.
"The sky is falling! It's all our fault!"
The climate on planet Earth has gotten less than a degree warmer in the last 150 years.
http://www.ecobridge.org/content/g_evd.htm#graph
Your fuel economy is best when your engine turns at the lowest rpm it can operate in your highest gear. Optimum power is basically irrelevant as far as fuel economy goes.
To keep moving, your car has to fight its internal friction, tire friction and deformation, and the wind resistance. Of those, internal friction is mostly a constant, tire resistance is mostly linear, and wind resistance is cubic. That is, roughly speaking, F = AV^3, or Force = (total surface Area) X (velocity cubed). At highway speeds, velocity is all that matters.
The actual formula is more complicated, using the integral of the change in the angle your car forces air to take as it passes over each area times that area, but it's dominated by your car's profile and the velocity.
Changing from velocity (x) to velocity (x - 5) near the speed limit results in about a 3% fuel savings.
Me, I just like to drive fast sometimes. If you do, too, don't kid yourself that it's for your engine's sake.
In my 50-node-and-smaller networks, it's just so much nicer to be able to install the OS on the machines and not have to mess with licensing. I think that goodness would be that much sweeter on a 500-node network.
:-).
They could have used *BSD, but that would have been like Harvard boys using Yale locks. A bunch of Stanford grads use Berkeley-derived stuff? Get real
I'm pretty sure it will never be the rage, but I like Programming Language Oriented Programming for difficult problems that don't seem doable in C/++ or something similar.
Most programs can be written practally in most languages, since all you really need is "if", "decrement" and "goto". Some problems aren't a good fit for a given language. That's why there's more than one.
Any program that breaks its problem into chunks is in effect creating its own mini-language. Whether you call it Abstact Data Typing or Object Orientation or Functional Programming or even Top Down Design, what it comes down to is dividing the problem into manageable chunks and working with those chunks until done.
I wish all CS students were taught from day one, or maybe day fifteen, how to create their own programming language. Usually you have to take a compilers course to get that.
Creating a new language is not that hard. It gets a bad rap because people think they have to write a backend for a given architecture, but writing the backend to generate C++ or some other HLL is just as good, since they've already done the heavy lifting and you can automate the compile train with your favorite maker.
I've been going to auctions and estate sales, picking them up for a few bucks a crate. Got about 1500 so far. There's a lot of Montavani and polka stuff, but every once in a while something really interesting, like some old jazz or blues will show up.
The good ones I clean up using a damp microfiber cloth, then convert to digital.