Half right. Patents should be awarded to inventions that are ridiculously simple, came in a flash of brilliance but are non-obvious until you see it. Things like the Biter Fighter for example, which is 2 balls of sponge connected by a string, that simultaneously prevent funnel-web spiders living in your shoes and prevent you misplacing just one shoe.
Maybe that's true in the USA. In many countries there are people who have ethics and believe in principles. Many people will represent themselves if they believe that they are not at fault. If they're right they get their court costs paid by the prosecuting party, and will also get additional damages awarded to them. That's how it works in Free countries anyway.
And yes, I know I'll get modded down to negative 100 as "flamebait" and "troll". I don't care. I'm one of those people who respect their Freedom enough to stand up for it. I forget who said that if you're not ready to die for your freedom then you're not really free, but I think it was one of your US Presidents, although it could have been Cicero or Plato.
"You could spend a bundle of money doing global load balancing and maintaining a full hot spare site, or you could figure out how critical it really is that your website be up within 5 minutes of some major disaster like an earthquake."
I wish I still had mod points left. It's overlooked by many people, that you should always compare the cost of a disaster/breakin/breakdown to the cost of being prepared for it. I've seen situations where over $10,000 was spent on a bug that would of cost about $200 in downtime. Similarly I've seen a few thousand dollars spent fixing a bug that affected one customer who was paying $15 per month.
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder if my age is starting to show.... memory failing.... teeth falling out along with hair....
Regardless, Bruce Schneier is certainly not just "a columnist" as was originally claimed.
Oddly enough, this song IS a terrorist song (in the opinion of some people). It was written by Woody Guthrie, and was one of the "subversive" songs of the McCarthy era. Woody was persecuted all his life for his left-leaning ethics, and his commitment to social justice and Freedom, as well as his sexual life, as he kept a distributed harem of multiple women scattered across the USA.. Many radio stations refused to play ANY of Woody's songs until fairly recently.
The voting machines in India work well. They are simple machines, simple to use, and simple to verify. And as the world's most populous democracy, they really understand the issues of getting a lot of votes processed in a reasonable time, in multiple languages. They have big buttons, clearly labeled, and no fancy "screens" or bells and whistles.
When I lived in the USA I really noticed that what you call "chocolate" is a completely different substance. One day I saw some Cadbury chocolate and thought "At lat! Some chocky that's fit to eat!". I was shocked when I tasted it, and found it was crap. Try some Cadbury chocolate from Australia or New Zealand - it's not the same as Belgian or French, but it's quite good for its price.
A great example I used to use when I taught 2nd year stats at uni was the odd correlation between the number of Protestant minsters per 1000 people and the number of teenage pregnancies per 1000 people in rural New South Wales in the 1980's - the correlation is about 0.96.
That doesn't mean that the Ministers are running around getting under-age girls pregnant, but rather that during the drought people turned to "simple pleasures" and sought spiritual easing of their hardships. Often a high correlation implies nothing about causation, but rather that two statistics are simply measuring the same thing.
The other thing I taught my students was that in most cases, Fischer's r is simply a tool used to apply for grant money, and should be regarded as an exploratory tool unless you're damn sure that you have a solid experimental design.
Correlation is not sufficient to imply causation, but it is necessary.
This is actually not true in general. It is entirely possible to have a cause-and-effect relationship but a insignificant correlation, as long as there are unaccounted for factors, or even sufficient noise. This is a common problem in the (ahem) soft sciences, such as psychology, where it's really hard to control extraneous variables in experiments involving people. This is why experiments involving identical twins under 10 years old are so valuable - there is little genetic variation, and there are less environmental factors to cause differences.
for dirs in //usr//usr/local ; do for prefix in '' 's' ; do cd ${dirs}${prefix}bin for binary in * ; do man $binary done;done;done
You shouldn't need to su to root to see in the various sbin dirs, only to run the apps. for example, on my system (debian etch)/sbin has permissions 755.
One of the "best practice" ideas for any unix-like OS is spend as little time as root as possible.
I too am red/green blind (damned if I'll be PC and say "deficient"). We have a huge edge over the "normal" people as we can see some things heaps easier. Most camouflage doesnt work so well for us, so you'll find a lot of colour-blind people poring over colour photos in a hidden room somewhere working for the military.
Another interesting thing is that nearly a third of males with Chinese heritage are red-green blind, as against about 8% with European heritage. This works when hunting as well. I can be trying to point out roos and koalas to my kids, but they really struggle to see them. It provides a real evolutionary advantage when times are hard for the hunter/gatherer.
I know that many Americans are concerned about the current Administration. I know that many (and maybe a majority) do not support the current policy regarding Iraq.
But to many of us in The Rest Of The World it does seem as if something has eroded your democratic processes to the point that it appears as if you have no control over your government. It also appears as if you, the electors, have no way of reclaiming what was once one of the most Free and Democratic systems of Government in the world.
Is my country "controlled" by the "moneyed interests"? Yes, particularly the Howard Government seems to be in the pockets of the big corporations. But we're not seeing policy being driven by them yet... and I hope to God we never see a situation where the Music and Film industries can buy legislation as has happened in the USA. Is my country perfect? Not quite.
I'd like to point out that to many of us outside the USA, it's really hard to see the difference between the Bush administration and its push to "democratise the world" and the situation in the 60's with Vietnam, or the 70s and 80s in Central America. Does Australia promote democracy? Yes, in fact there are many countries who when they do adopt democracy use what they call "the Australian ballot". The difference is that in most cases these countries ask us to help them implement an electoral system, rather than us invading the country, or machinating a coup (as happened to us in 1975, when the US was a factor in The Dismissal of our elected Government (yes, there were other factors)).
The USA tries to promote Democracy and Christian values across the world. The catch is that we don't see it working in the USA, so why would people feel comfortable with it being forced on them. Perhaps if the actions of the USA in foreign policy matched the rhetoric you'd find far fewer people would be so opposed to American Foreign Policy.
Finally, as long as your country keeps telling other countries how to run themselves, I'm not going to "shut the fuck up", and I'm not going to "sit back down". If it's good enough for the USA, it's good enough for me after all. And perhaps if less Americans stopped sitting down and started to stand up for what's written in your constitution we wouldn't have to have this discussion.
Perhaps you're being sarcastic, but I'll bite anyway...
There is nothing similar between optimisation and security. Early optimisation paints you into corners, and will reduce your flexilbility when requirements change (as happens in real software development). Make sure that the design is secure from the start, and then make the software work. Then start profiling and then optimising. This way you don't waste time pruning microseconds from code that's rarely run whilst missing the millisecond+ speedups from somewhere else, and you don't have to try to understand your tricky but blindingly fast code when you realise that the client didnt actually understand what he needed the software to do.
A classic example I saw was code where over a week was spent setting up superfast locking primitives, saving lots of CPU cycles and allowing massive concurrency, when the software was actually bound by network latency talking to the database. This added about $2000 to the cost of development, but provided no real speedup for the application, whilst making any changes to the system much nastier as programmers had to jump through all these extra hoops to make sure they did things The Right Way.
Motorola has some nice development kits. They feature a 68xx or 68xxx processor, a small amount of ram,a monitor rom, a hex keypad, a 7 seg LED display and an RS232 port. Not very expensive and you can put your fingers into everything.
I have fond memories of learning Z80 on a Sinclair ZX81. You'd have to translate assembler to machine code, and then to the "extended character set", then embed that in a BASIC REM statement. You then set the PC to the start of the comment. doing non-trivial tasks in 1k of ram (or 16k if you had the extension pack) taught me a lot about the fine details of programming, and about "thinking before coding".
Later I got to play with a TRS-80, still the Z80 but with a whopping 64k of RAM. The Z80 had two sets of registers as well as a way of setting up banked memory addressing, and by cunning use of coroutines you could simulate a primitive sort of multitasking. Was a lot of fun for a young fellow (18yo as I recall), and made me a much better programmer in C (when I finally got me a 486 many years later).
I also had the pleasure of programming in MACRO on a DEC-20 (KA-10 as I recall) around 1980. Although not quite assembler (it featured some very high level monitor calls) I still remember the joy of writing a file copy program in about 24 instructions.
This from the country that is busy trying to get its own version of "democracy" pushed down the throats of other countries?
OK, So I'll get modded "Troll" and "Flamebait". But isn't it time you Americans fought back for your democracy, before you lose it all in the name of the "War against Terror"?
The Celtic peoples (Welsh, Irish, Breton) have a culture of music for pleasure that extends back before the 2nd Century AD. Since our modern system of music notation can be traced to the Welsh, that seems to me to invalidate your assertion.
I find IETab very useful for a quick check on how a website I'm working on renders in IE. I don't like having lots of conditional comments or "jumps through hoops" javascript to ensure the sites work in IE and FF, so this gives me a two click way of viwing a page in IE and then back to FF.
I think in the U.S.A. we have to ensure our own democracy before we try to bring democracy elsewhere by force.
I encourage more American's to think like this. It might be the only way you'll return to being a country that's respected and emulated in any way other than as the source of great vices.
Indeed, "democracy by force" is a good way of looking at what the USA has done repeatedly over the last 60 years. Look at other countries (such as New Zealand, the UK and Australia) for other models of democracy that don't rely on world subjugation and armed invasions.
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Half right. Patents should be awarded to inventions that are ridiculously simple, came in a flash of brilliance but are non-obvious until you see it. Things like the Biter Fighter for example, which is 2 balls of sponge connected by a string, that simultaneously prevent funnel-web spiders living in your shoes and prevent you misplacing just one shoe.
And yes, I know I'll get modded down to negative 100 as "flamebait" and "troll". I don't care. I'm one of those people who respect their Freedom enough to stand up for it. I forget who said that if you're not ready to die for your freedom then you're not really free, but I think it was one of your US Presidents, although it could have been Cicero or Plato.
I wish I still had mod points left. It's overlooked by many people, that you should always compare the cost of a disaster/breakin/breakdown to the cost of being prepared for it. I've seen situations where over $10,000 was spent on a bug that would of cost about $200 in downtime. Similarly I've seen a few thousand dollars spent fixing a bug that affected one customer who was paying $15 per month.
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder if my age is starting to show.... memory failing.... teeth falling out along with hair.... Regardless, Bruce Schneier is certainly not just "a columnist" as was originally claimed.
Schneier worked for Checkpoint as I recall.
Bruce Schneier is not "a columnist". He invented the firewall, is is one of the more clued people regarding IT security in the world.
As I said somewhere else, look at Squeak's OSProcess plugin. It turns a Smalltalk Workspace into a object oriented shell.
You mean like a Squeak Workspace with the OSProcess plugin? It's only 35 year old technology...
Oddly enough, this song IS a terrorist song (in the opinion of some people). It was written by Woody Guthrie, and was one of the "subversive" songs of the McCarthy era. Woody was persecuted all his life for his left-leaning ethics, and his commitment to social justice and Freedom, as well as his sexual life, as he kept a distributed harem of multiple women scattered across the USA.. Many radio stations refused to play ANY of Woody's songs until fairly recently.
Might it be that on average, Canada is colder? Not that I've ever been there, but what I see on TV makes me think of a land of ice and snow.
I'm pretty sure that Alan Kay invented the tabs concept at Xerox PARC when he invented Smalltalk (and the GUI) sometime in the 1970's.
The voting machines in India work well. They are simple machines, simple to use, and simple to verify. And as the world's most populous democracy, they really understand the issues of getting a lot of votes processed in a reasonable time, in multiple languages. They have big buttons, clearly labeled, and no fancy "screens" or bells and whistles.
When I lived in the USA I really noticed that what you call "chocolate" is a completely different substance. One day I saw some Cadbury chocolate and thought "At lat! Some chocky that's fit to eat!". I was shocked when I tasted it, and found it was crap. Try some Cadbury chocolate from Australia or New Zealand - it's not the same as Belgian or French, but it's quite good for its price.
That doesn't mean that the Ministers are running around getting under-age girls pregnant, but rather that during the drought people turned to "simple pleasures" and sought spiritual easing of their hardships. Often a high correlation implies nothing about causation, but rather that two statistics are simply measuring the same thing.
The other thing I taught my students was that in most cases, Fischer's r is simply a tool used to apply for grant money, and should be regarded as an exploratory tool unless you're damn sure that you have a solid experimental design.
This is actually not true in general. It is entirely possible to have a cause-and-effect relationship but a insignificant correlation, as long as there are unaccounted for factors, or even sufficient noise. This is a common problem in the (ahem) soft sciences, such as psychology, where it's really hard to control extraneous variables in experiments involving people. This is why experiments involving identical twins under 10 years old are so valuable - there is little genetic variation, and there are less environmental factors to cause differences.
Or you could try:
/usr/ /usr/local ; do
/sbin has permissions 755.
for dirs in /
for prefix in '' 's' ; do
cd ${dirs}${prefix}bin
for binary in * ; do
man $binary
done;done;done
You shouldn't need to su to root to see in the various sbin dirs, only to run the apps. for example, on my system (debian etch)
One of the "best practice" ideas for any unix-like OS is spend as little time as root as possible.
Another interesting thing is that nearly a third of males with Chinese heritage are red-green blind, as against about 8% with European heritage. This works when hunting as well. I can be trying to point out roos and koalas to my kids, but they really struggle to see them. It provides a real evolutionary advantage when times are hard for the hunter/gatherer.
But to many of us in The Rest Of The World it does seem as if something has eroded your democratic processes to the point that it appears as if you have no control over your government. It also appears as if you, the electors, have no way of reclaiming what was once one of the most Free and Democratic systems of Government in the world.
Is my country "controlled" by the "moneyed interests"? Yes, particularly the Howard Government seems to be in the pockets of the big corporations. But we're not seeing policy being driven by them yet... and I hope to God we never see a situation where the Music and Film industries can buy legislation as has happened in the USA. Is my country perfect? Not quite.
I'd like to point out that to many of us outside the USA, it's really hard to see the difference between the Bush administration and its push to "democratise the world" and the situation in the 60's with Vietnam, or the 70s and 80s in Central America. Does Australia promote democracy? Yes, in fact there are many countries who when they do adopt democracy use what they call "the Australian ballot". The difference is that in most cases these countries ask us to help them implement an electoral system, rather than us invading the country, or machinating a coup (as happened to us in 1975, when the US was a factor in The Dismissal of our elected Government (yes, there were other factors)).
The USA tries to promote Democracy and Christian values across the world. The catch is that we don't see it working in the USA, so why would people feel comfortable with it being forced on them. Perhaps if the actions of the USA in foreign policy matched the rhetoric you'd find far fewer people would be so opposed to American Foreign Policy.
Finally, as long as your country keeps telling other countries how to run themselves, I'm not going to "shut the fuck up", and I'm not going to "sit back down". If it's good enough for the USA, it's good enough for me after all. And perhaps if less Americans stopped sitting down and started to stand up for what's written in your constitution we wouldn't have to have this discussion.
There is nothing similar between optimisation and security. Early optimisation paints you into corners, and will reduce your flexilbility when requirements change (as happens in real software development). Make sure that the design is secure from the start, and then make the software work. Then start profiling and then optimising. This way you don't waste time pruning microseconds from code that's rarely run whilst missing the millisecond+ speedups from somewhere else, and you don't have to try to understand your tricky but blindingly fast code when you realise that the client didnt actually understand what he needed the software to do.
A classic example I saw was code where over a week was spent setting up superfast locking primitives, saving lots of CPU cycles and allowing massive concurrency, when the software was actually bound by network latency talking to the database. This added about $2000 to the cost of development, but provided no real speedup for the application, whilst making any changes to the system much nastier as programmers had to jump through all these extra hoops to make sure they did things The Right Way.
Motorola has some nice development kits. They feature a 68xx or 68xxx processor, a small amount of ram ,a monitor rom, a hex keypad, a 7 seg LED display and an RS232 port. Not very expensive and you can put your fingers into everything.
Later I got to play with a TRS-80, still the Z80 but with a whopping 64k of RAM. The Z80 had two sets of registers as well as a way of setting up banked memory addressing, and by cunning use of coroutines you could simulate a primitive sort of multitasking. Was a lot of fun for a young fellow (18yo as I recall), and made me a much better programmer in C (when I finally got me a 486 many years later).
I also had the pleasure of programming in MACRO on a DEC-20 (KA-10 as I recall) around 1980. Although not quite assembler (it featured some very high level monitor calls) I still remember the joy of writing a file copy program in about 24 instructions.
OK, So I'll get modded "Troll" and "Flamebait". But isn't it time you Americans fought back for your democracy, before you lose it all in the name of the "War against Terror"?
The Celtic peoples (Welsh, Irish, Breton) have a culture of music for pleasure that extends back before the 2nd Century AD. Since our modern system of music notation can be traced to the Welsh, that seems to me to invalidate your assertion.
I find IETab very useful for a quick check on how a website I'm working on renders in IE. I don't like having lots of conditional comments or "jumps through hoops" javascript to ensure the sites work in IE and FF, so this gives me a two click way of viwing a page in IE and then back to FF.
I encourage more American's to think like this. It might be the only way you'll return to being a country that's respected and emulated in any way other than as the source of great vices.
Indeed, "democracy by force" is a good way of looking at what the USA has done repeatedly over the last 60 years. Look at other countries (such as New Zealand, the UK and Australia) for other models of democracy that don't rely on world subjugation and armed invasions.