No, the real question is: how do you propose we keep our keystroke patterns a secret from someone who wants to record them? Do we have to refuse to use keyboards in public terminals now?
Your penalty is to type this fifty times:
Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets.
Maybe the best way to be less vulnerable to this is to have online fans who say good things about you. Then someone doing searches will see good reviews to counter the bad, and you're not responding to everything yourself. It's tougher for a business that has little online presence or reputation.
Suppose you're running a one-person business and one of your customers is obnoxious to you. Should you be required to forget all about it and treat them as any new customer next time you see them? Requiring businesses to delete records about their customers is essentially enforced amnesia. Whenever there's a transaction, it seems pretty reasonable for both sides to remember what happened.
And then there's the question not only of what you should remember but who should you tell. If you have a bad experience as a customer, most people would feel perfectly justified in telling their friends, posting to their blog, and engaging in other bad publicity towards the company. When a business gets ripped off, who are they allowed to tell? Should assholes and deadbeats get a free pass next time?
The other side to this is that we've grown accustomed to a certain amount of anonymity when dealing with larger businesses. This is a sort of automatic forgiveness. Some kind of forgiveness is essential, because memories are fallible, records can be wrong, and people change. Not to mention that there's an enormous power imbalance when you're dealing with a big business. But the question of how long you should remember, what you should forgive and forget, and how that should affect peoples' reputations doesn't have simple answers.
I'd like to be able to start a game of Civ IV, tell it "I have four hours to play" and have it automatically adjust so that game doesn't last more than 4 hours. No more staying up to 3 am playing some silly game, and I'd really rather start a fresh game each time anyway.
Of course that's easier with a real-time game, but it should be true of most games.
Movies are a lot better in that way because you know going in how long they'll be.
Slashdot is really the wrong place for this sort of discussion, but here goes: It sounds like you're working on a product that doesn't have a product manager. The way it's supposed to work is that the product manager decides what goes into the product and coordinates with the developers to come up with a realistic schedule. Anyone who has a request should be talking to the product manager to get it into the schedule.
The article is very vague. It sounds like they're writing automated tests and rejecting any code that doesn't pass the tests. But I can't imagine that they didn't have a regression test suite before, so I wonder what changed?
They still have a DMZ. What they actually did is moved people's laptops and personal computers outside the firewall. The servers are apparently still still locked down using "application-level" firewalls.
The idea is that people will taking their laptops home and on the road and need to be secure in those conditions. If they have to secure the clients anyway, there's no point in maintaining two different configurations and they might as well assume all clients are on a hostile network all the time.
I played the first two when the winners were announced (because I was too lazy to judge this year).
Luminous Horizon is a well-polished game, but it's the third part of a superhero series and the story is nothing new. The most interesting part about it is the way it handles switching characters and hints.
Blue Chairs is far more interesting. It's hard to summarize, but it starts out with a drug trip at a party that turns into a dream sequence. Even if that's not your thing, it allows for some amazing writing. Highly recommended.
Not true - lots of Java programs use property files. And even when it is XML, the schemas are all different and can be quite cryptic. But two popular config formats is better than many.
Well, sort-of kind-of not really. In functional programming, *every* method is essentially a constructor. (It constructs a result, and that's all it does.) Also, all objects are immutable, and many of the objects you're constructing are themselves functions.
The similarity is that an object's properties are always specified at construction time.
Another way to think about functional programming is as constructor-based programming. Problems are solved by constructing lots of temporary objects that are a little closer to the solution, until you're finally in a position to construct the answer.
You can do this in any language, but to be efficient, you need an good garbage collector and a compiler that can optimize out most of the temporary objects.
If you've installed OS X on a UFS filesystem, the Media Player installer hangs.
The release notes do say Media Player doesn't work on UFS, but I was hoping to install it on the HFS+ partition I keep around for such things. There's no way to tell Media Player to install anywhere other than the Applications folder, and apparently no way to move the Applications folder to another drive, so I guess I'm stuck.
Re:Lies, statistics, and analysts
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
I recently bought an eMac and was quite disappointed with the loud fan. Furthermore, unlike a laptop, the fan runs all the time, not just when there's high CPU usage. Since 'sleep' works so well it's livable, but if you're looking for a quiet server to leave on all the time, you'd be better off with something else.
It's my understanding that the dual-processor desktop models are quite loud as well.
Um, the GPL says nothing about what happens if someone violates it. The damages are determined by the courts if it ever goes that far. I don't know what the typical damages are for copyright violation, but it seems unlikely that they would include source code disclosure.
Opinion-heavy, fact-free rant in the best slashdot style:
It is more important that the documentation be written and updated than it be organized. If you make individual contributors jump through hoops, lots of documentation will never be written. And documentation shouldn't wait until there's a place to put it.
Organization is important too, of course. The best way is to have someone be the librarian. Once there are useful conventions, people will follow the librarian's lead.
What's to stop people from sharing accounts? Does passport have Terms of Service?
What happens if someone gets banned from Passport? Would third-party merchants seriously consider refusing to do business with someone who doesn't (or can't get, or refuses to get) a Passport account? It seems unlikely. I'd guess that just as merchants accept multiple forms of payment, Passport will be one way of logging into a site, but not the only one.
I've been coding in EJB's for six months (using WebLogic 5.1) and ran into the following problems (with entity beans).
1) excessive database traffic. A single SQL query using bare JDBC turns into N+1 queries if you use entity beans. There's one query for the finder method, plus one query to load each row found by the finder method. This is a stupid way to query a database.
2) excessive locking. Entities are locked (using exclusive locks) until the transaction completes. This can lead to lots of threads waiting on the same lock, or possibly even deadlocks. All that nice concurrency you get from using a database with row-level locking, shared locks, or read-only queries gets thrown out the window.
3) gets in the way of SQL optimization. To get good performance you need well-tuned SQL. Container-managed persistence makes people think they don't need to learn SQL.
4) reduced caching. The only thing WebLogic gives you for caching is read-only beans. On your own you can probably come up with much better caching strategies.
We started out all EJB's and will continue to use them for our intranet since they're good enough for a low-traffic application, but will not use them for our Internet site. If I had to do it again I wouldn't use EJB's. (Although, to be fair, I suppose you could do okay if you used Session beans only and wrote all your own SQL.)
Some comments from a semi-enthusiastic Java programmer:
I don't understand why people complain that Java is too object-oriented. If you don't need objects, use a class where every method is static. Such a class is the equivalent to a non-objected-oriented module or namespace. (I will agree that the Java class libraries are missing some important static convenience methods, particularly when it comes to formatting numbers, but you can write your own until Sun wises up.)
As far as polymophism (templates) goes, I can't remember the last time someone here screwed up by storing the wrong type in a container. Eliminating the cast when fetching from a container would be cleaner syntax but it doesn't catch a whole lot of errors in practice. (Perhaps this is because I mostly use Vectors and Hashtables as instance and local variables and rarely in method parameters or return values.)
I agree that you should not trust anyone's promises with respect to Java's performance or bugs, especially Sun. Do your own tests. Pick a set of VM's to support (wich exact version numbers) and add to it cautiously. (Just because 1.2.1_03a works, do not assume 1.2.1_04 works.) Never promise "run anywhere".
I'll agree that enum would be nice, though I don't use constant integers all that much.
Re: datatypes. As a former Perl programmer, I'm convinced that the three essential data types are string, extendable array (a.k.a. Vector), and hashtable. If you have efficient implementations of all three with convenient syntax, you can build anything else easily. Java doesn't measure up, particularly with its slow String and unextendable array types, but at least it has standard (though inefficient) String, Vector, and Hashtable classes (and the 1.2 containers will be helpful). Contrast this with the zillion string implementations in the C/C++ world.
I think Java's going to win for a while, based not on the language so much as standard threads and the ever-expanding enormous standard library. Who even needs to write algorithms anymore when you're handed them all? (Just kidding:-)
re: Swing. Luckily I've never used it since I don't do client side. Maybe 1.3 will be tolerable.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the real question is: how do you propose we keep our keystroke patterns a secret from someone who wants to record them? Do we have to refuse to use keyboards in public terminals now?
Your penalty is to type this fifty times:
Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets.
Maybe the best way to be less vulnerable to this is to have online fans who say good things about you. Then someone doing searches will see good reviews to counter the bad, and you're not responding to everything yourself. It's tougher for a business that has little online presence or reputation.
Suppose you're running a one-person business and one of your customers is obnoxious to you. Should you be required to forget all about it and treat them as any new customer next time you see them? Requiring businesses to delete records about their customers is essentially enforced amnesia. Whenever there's a transaction, it seems pretty reasonable for both sides to remember what happened.
And then there's the question not only of what you should remember but who should you tell. If you have a bad experience as a customer, most people would feel perfectly justified in telling their friends, posting to their blog, and engaging in other bad publicity towards the company. When a business gets ripped off, who are they allowed to tell? Should assholes and deadbeats get a free pass next time?
The other side to this is that we've grown accustomed to a certain amount of anonymity when dealing with larger businesses. This is a sort of automatic forgiveness. Some kind of forgiveness is essential, because memories are fallible, records can be wrong, and people change. Not to mention that there's an enormous power imbalance when you're dealing with a big business. But the question of how long you should remember, what you should forgive and forget, and how that should affect peoples' reputations doesn't have simple answers.
I'd like to be able to start a game of Civ IV, tell it "I have four hours to play" and have it automatically adjust so that game doesn't last more than 4 hours. No more staying up to 3 am playing some silly game, and I'd really rather start a fresh game each time anyway.
Of course that's easier with a real-time game, but it should be true of most games.
Movies are a lot better in that way because you know going in how long they'll be.
Actually, you already have access to quite a bit of that data. (Aggregated, of course.)
a b=0&geo=all&date=all
i xie+chicks
Slashdot vs. Digg
http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2Cdigg&ct
Britney Spears vs. Dixie Chicks
http://www.google.com/trends?q=britney+spears%2Cd
Slashdot is really the wrong place for this sort of discussion, but here goes: It sounds like you're working on a product that doesn't have a product manager. The way it's supposed to work is that the product manager decides what goes into the product and coordinates with the developers to come up with a realistic schedule. Anyone who has a request should be talking to the product manager to get it into the schedule.
The article is very vague. It sounds like they're writing automated tests and rejecting any code that doesn't pass the tests. But I can't imagine that they didn't have a regression test suite before, so I wonder what changed?
They still have a DMZ. What they actually did is moved people's laptops and personal computers outside the firewall. The servers are apparently still still locked down using "application-level" firewalls.
The idea is that people will taking their laptops home and on the road and need to be secure in those conditions. If they have to secure the clients anyway, there's no point in maintaining two different configurations and they might as well assume all clients are on a hostile network all the time.
Couldn't you reduce the MTU (maximum TCP packet size) for outgoing packets? If the problem is as you say, that should help a lot.
It's interesting that there's no mention of Java 1.5, even though it's in the developer preview. Maybe the Java upgrade will slip to 10.4.1?
But isn't having more people contributing to Wikipedia supposed to be a good thing? Why isn't this "extra work" a nice problem to have?
I played the first two when the winners were announced (because I was too lazy to judge this year).
Luminous Horizon is a well-polished game, but it's the third part of a superhero series and the story is nothing new. The most interesting part about it is the way it handles switching characters and hints.
Blue Chairs is far more interesting. It's hard to summarize, but it starts out with a drug trip at a party that turns into a dream sequence. Even if that's not your thing, it allows for some amazing writing. Highly recommended.
Not true - lots of Java programs use property files. And even when it is XML, the schemas are all different and can be quite cryptic. But two popular config formats is better than many.
I believe the correct term is "blipvert".
Well, sort-of kind-of not really. In functional programming, *every* method is essentially a constructor. (It constructs a result, and that's all it does.) Also, all objects are immutable, and many of the objects you're constructing are themselves functions.
The similarity is that an object's properties are always specified at construction time.
Another way to think about functional programming is as constructor-based programming. Problems are solved by constructing lots of temporary objects that are a little closer to the solution, until you're finally in a position to construct the answer.
You can do this in any language, but to be efficient, you need an good garbage collector and a compiler that can optimize out most of the temporary objects.
If you've installed OS X on a UFS filesystem, the Media Player installer hangs.
The release notes do say Media Player doesn't work on UFS, but I was hoping to install it on the HFS+ partition I keep around for such things. There's no way to tell Media Player to install anywhere other than the Applications folder, and apparently no way to move the Applications folder to another drive, so I guess I'm stuck.
Try IntelliJ. You won't look back.
I recently bought an eMac and was quite disappointed with the loud fan. Furthermore, unlike a laptop, the fan runs all the time, not just when there's high CPU usage. Since 'sleep' works so well it's livable, but if you're looking for a quiet server to leave on all the time, you'd be better off with something else.
It's my understanding that the dual-processor desktop models are quite loud as well.
Um, the GPL says nothing about what happens if someone violates it. The damages are determined by the courts if it ever goes that far. I don't know what the typical damages are for copyright violation, but it seems unlikely that they would include source code disclosure.
Opinion-heavy, fact-free rant in the best slashdot style:
It is more important that the documentation be written and updated than it be organized. If you make individual contributors jump through hoops, lots of documentation will never be written. And documentation shouldn't wait until there's a place to put it.
Organization is important too, of course. The best way is to have someone be the librarian. Once there are useful conventions, people will follow the librarian's lead.
I did a few web searches and found nothing about the Red Cross bombing being intentional. If it's true, back it up.
What's to stop people from sharing accounts? Does passport have Terms of Service?
What happens if someone gets banned from Passport? Would third-party merchants seriously consider refusing to do business with someone who doesn't (or can't get, or refuses to get) a Passport account? It seems unlikely. I'd guess that just as merchants accept multiple forms of payment, Passport will be one way of logging into a site, but not the only one.
I've been coding in EJB's for six months (using WebLogic 5.1) and ran into the following problems (with entity beans).
1) excessive database traffic. A single SQL query using bare JDBC turns into N+1 queries if you use entity beans. There's one query for the finder method, plus one query to load each row found by the finder method. This is a stupid way to query a database.
2) excessive locking. Entities are locked (using exclusive locks) until the transaction completes. This can lead to lots of threads waiting on the same lock, or possibly even deadlocks. All that nice concurrency you get from using a database with row-level locking, shared locks, or read-only queries gets thrown out the window.
3) gets in the way of SQL optimization. To get good performance you need well-tuned SQL. Container-managed persistence makes people think they don't need to learn SQL.
4) reduced caching. The only thing WebLogic gives you for caching is read-only beans. On your own you can probably come up with much better caching strategies.
We started out all EJB's and will continue to use them for our intranet since they're good enough for a low-traffic application, but will not use them for our Internet site. If I had to do it again I wouldn't use EJB's. (Although, to be fair, I suppose you could do okay if you used Session beans only and wrote all your own SQL.)
Some comments from a semi-enthusiastic Java programmer:
:-)
I don't understand why people complain that Java
is too object-oriented. If you don't need objects, use a class where every method is static. Such a class is the equivalent to a non-objected-oriented module or namespace. (I will agree that the Java class libraries are missing some important static convenience methods, particularly when it comes to formatting numbers, but you can write your own until Sun wises up.)
As far as polymophism (templates) goes, I can't remember the last time someone here screwed up by storing the wrong type in a container. Eliminating the cast when fetching from a container would be cleaner syntax but it doesn't catch a whole lot of errors in practice. (Perhaps this is because I mostly use Vectors and Hashtables as instance and local variables and rarely in method parameters or return values.)
I agree that you should not trust anyone's promises with respect to Java's performance or bugs, especially Sun. Do your own tests. Pick a set of VM's to support (wich exact version numbers) and add to it cautiously. (Just because 1.2.1_03a works, do not assume 1.2.1_04 works.) Never promise "run anywhere".
I'll agree that enum would be nice, though I don't use constant integers all that much.
Re: datatypes. As a former Perl programmer, I'm convinced that the three essential data types are string, extendable array (a.k.a. Vector), and hashtable. If you have efficient implementations of all three with convenient syntax, you can build anything else easily. Java doesn't measure up, particularly with its slow String and unextendable array types, but at least it has standard (though inefficient) String, Vector, and Hashtable classes (and the 1.2 containers will be helpful). Contrast this with the zillion string implementations in the C/C++ world.
I think Java's going to win for a while, based not on the language so much as standard threads and the ever-expanding enormous standard library. Who even needs to write algorithms anymore when you're handed them all? (Just kidding
re: Swing. Luckily I've never used it since I don't do client side. Maybe 1.3 will be tolerable.