After that I quit. I hear they are using Access 95 with VBA.
I think you're trying to be funny (or at least sarcastic) but the last time I worked on a system that stored multiple values in a field as delimted string--as this guy proposes storing mutiple authors and keywords--was for a late 90s dotcom running a web site off of an Access 97 mdb.
Maybe you should factor in the usage pattern and instance counts as well.
Someone's bio might appear in how many articles? A few hundred? And how often will the bio be updated? A couple of times a year? So, updating a bio comes down to touching a few hundred records a few times a year. Compare that with thousands of accesses per day and you've suddenly tipped the scale.
That's exactly the sort of answer I was looking for. Thank you. (Actually, I'd expect most bios get updated only a handful of times over the life of the author. You start with first publications as a grad student, then you leave school, maybe change jobs a couple of times, maybe a few notable achievements, then the author dies.)
That is the sort of design considerations I'd like to read about. That would give a useful comparison between platforms. As it is, this article boils down to "I went NoSQL over RDMS, because...well, just because. I went Amazon over something else because it's easier for my idiot client to administer."
Which, along with his horrible Java vs. C# comparison, makes Jeff Cogswell officially the Slashdot contributor with the worst analytical skills.
OK, that's what I thought. Well, first, for anyone who hasn't read or doesn't remember that "Java vs. C#" thing, don't go back and read it now. Save your time, it's horrible.
Now, for the current article, isn't designing a database all about trade-offs? E.g. Indexes make it easier to find stuff, but then make extra work (updating indexes) when adding stuff. It's about balancing reading and writing, speed and maintenance, etc. And it seems like this guy has only thought about pulling out a single article to the exclusion of everything else.
Do we just not understand DynamoDB? How does this system pull all the articles by a certain author or with a certain keyword? What if they need to update an author's bio? With categories stored within the article object, how does he enforce integrity, so all "general relativity" articles end up with "general relativity" and not a mix of GR, Gen Rel, g relativity, etc?
What happens when they want to add full text search? Or pictures to articles? That 64k limit would seem like a deal breaker. 64k that includes EVERYTHING about an article--abstract, full text, authors and bios, etc.
My first thought was, this does not make much sense. Then I thought, well, I work with old skool RDMS, and I just don't get NoSQL. But now I think, naw, this guy really doesn't know enough to merit the level of attention his blatherings get on/.
As someone whose work and thinking are firmly planted in traditional RDMS, a few of those decisions did not make sense.
I understand what he's saying about normalized tables for author, keywords, and categories. But then when he has to build and maintain index tables for author, keyword, and categories, doesn't that negate any advantage of not having those tables?
I understand he's designed things to easy retrieval of articles, but it seems the trade-offs on other functions are too great. It's nice an author's bio is right there in the article object, but when it's time to update the bio, that does mean going through and touching every article by that author?
I've I got a bunch of similar examples, and I would not be at all surprised if they all boiled down to 'I don't understand what this guy is doing,' but basically, isn't NoSQL strength in dealing with dynamic content and in this example, serving static articles, the choice between NoSQL and traditional RDMS essentially up to personal preference?
One complaint conservatives about liberals is that they tend to try to outlaw stuff reactively. The EPA comes to mind, forbidding property owners certain uses of their land.
Oh yeah, that wacky liberal who gave us the EPA. What was his name again, that pot smoking, Grateful Dead following hippie?
Richard Nixon.
That Nixon is now considered a liberal is all the proof I need that US politics are truely farked beyond all recognition.
Most of "TFA" is actually complaining (legitmately) about the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web, which is a tangent (in the strictest sense) to the book review.
I disagree that subby's complaints in regards to cooking instruction on the web are legitimate.
1) I don't see subby complaining about cooking instruction. I see subby complaining about recipes.
2) You don't learn how to cook from recipes any more than you'd learn basic physics from the latest journal articles.
3) Like you learn basic physics from a text book, subby should learn how to cook from a cook book. Any decent cook book will cover those basics not included in every recipe. Once you learn how to cook, then you can read a recipe, just like how once you have the basics down, then you can understand a physics journal article.
Most people just dump a can into a pan or throw something into the microwave.
Cooking is a skill that takes time and study. Actually, some youtube videos are pretty good guides to the basics. If you want to REALLY learn culinary basics, you either have to take a class or make a lot of crappy meals first. With cooking, like most things worth doing, you have to PRACTICE.
Judging a recipe based on what a complete newbie does the first time is like judging a programming language based on what a complete newbie can do with a single man page or help entry.
If you want to learn how to cook, you at least need a cook book, not a single recipe. Any decent cook book will cover all those basics that don't including in every recipe because we don't want 100 page recipes for boiling pasta.
Subby's popper recipes didn't cover all the details of preparing the peppers. They also didn't get in to sharpening knives, calibrating the oven, measuring dry ingredients, and scores of other details. A really detailed recipe to meet subby's requirements would be a short novel for even the simplest dish.
What a newbie does with 1 run of a recipe is a near useless metric. What a newbie does with a little practice, for example on the fifth time on the same recipe, is a better measure.
I've seen some crap here, but this one takes the cake.
Is this a book review or subby's adventures in cooking? And if it is a book review, is that book a cook book?
Why is someone who can't cook going on about recipes on the web? It's like someone whose last science class was 'Physics for Poets' picking up the latest journal from the American Physical Society and complaining about the articles.
If you're a complete physics newbie, you don't learn by picking up the latest journal, you learn by picking up a text book. If you're a cooking newbie, you don't learn from recipes, you learn from a cook book. Any decent cook book will have all the background and additional information not included in the recipes.
Subby doesn't want good directions, subby wants useless directions.
Let's use the recipe example. So instead of "preheat oven to 350," every recipe begins with 2 pages on measuring the temperature in and calibrating your oven. And instead of a list of ingredients with the required amounts, you get a dissertation on the difference between dry measure and liquid measure, with conversion between teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, etc. So the simplest recipe turns in to a novelette.
And that is repeated for every single recipe. Of course all that extra information isn't needed 99% of the time. Is that what you want subby? 100 page recipes for jalapeños poppers?
And WTF? Jalapeños poppers? Are in training for be a chef at TGIF? How many pieces of flair are you wearing right now?
Yes, a good cook book should talk about how to clean and chop vegetables, should talk about different cuts of meat, should talk about technique, should cover how to calibrate your heat sources. And it should cover all those things ONCE. Not in every recipe.
I submit 1) the test of a good recipe is not what the complete noob can the first time preparing that recipe. A better test is what the complete noob can do with the 5th time preparing that recipe.
Is the test of a programming language book or tutorial the first program created by a newbie?
And 2) subby should grow up, be a man (or woman) and skip the gloves when preparing jalapeños. They're not that hot.
The basic gist of the book is that starting roughly 30 years ago, linguists and educational theorists decided that teaching grammar and prescriptive rules (arbitrary rules, they might say!) is not necessary.
Arbitrary is not the same as not necessary. The grammer rules of any language are absolutely arbitrary.
Whether we drive on the left or the right side of the road is arbitrary. But it is still necessary to teach new drivers on which side of the road to drive.
Fire up a virtual machine every time someone emails you a document, and then move that document over to the virtual machine (after it books), open up your Office suite, and then move the document back.
Man, that is sure convenient.
Why would you do it that way? When I read the VM suggestion, I thought it basically meant live in the VM full time. There is a post above where a person used an XP VM in Win7 for a legacy app that wouldn't run in his Win7 set up. But that was one app, not an office suite.
If you're using MS Office for everything, including Outlook for email, and you're using a VM so you can change hardware by moving the VM instead of reinstalling Office, why not fire up the VM as soon as Windows boots and put all your apps in there?
I mean, 1) you're going to spend so much time in the VM, you might as well stay in, and 2) you've done the work of making your system easy to restore to get around reinstalling Office, why not take advantage and make all your software as easy to restore?
Moving files between levels of virtualization wouldn't be an issue. You pay a price at start up, as the OS and VM boot, but a small price. And I'm in the minority as someone who still shuts down PCs. Don't most folk use sleep or hibernate, or for a desktop, just leave it one all the time?
I've only used VMs on beefy servers, never on consumer desktop or laptop hardware. Is there a performance reason you wouldn't live in the VM full time? The top level OS could be light; the only thing it is doing is handling the VM (and passing off messages between the VM and outside world? I don't know where VMs live on your OSI model.).
Anyway, I just had an issue with MS Office 2010 where my wife's HD crashed, I reinstalled (I just back up data, because you can always reinstall software, right?), then her MB went, and when reinstalling on a new machine and trying to register, it got denied as too many installs. This is legal, paid for, copy of Office.
On a site that I sell stuff on (restricted to handmade and vintage), vintage is defined as at least 20 years old. It is still going to feel strange putting up these Genesis games there soon that I picked up a while back at Goodwill. But, they are old enough to qualify, so why not?
IANAEIA (I am not an expert in antiquities) but, the definition of "antique" will depend on what the thing is. Generally, the things the change and get old fast, become antiques fast. This server is about 10~12 years old. As another poster noted, the contemporary OS is only one version past EOL.
Cell phones--with a new generation coming out every 6 or 9 months--might be antique at 10 years. Game systems--with a new generation every few years, but with large leaps in capabilities between generations--might be antique at 20 years. So the PS1, XBox, Dreamcast are old. NES, Intellivision, Coleco are antique. Genesis is right along that line, as production went in to the late 1990s. I wouldn't criticize you for labeling Genesis games or console antique, but again, I am not an expert.
Servers (in my mind) have a similar timeline. 10 years past release is old. 20 years is antique. While Subby is running this server as an historical demonstration, there are certainly business running the same model for daily operations.
These gray areas exist because we don't have a mature market for these devices (as far as I know). Consider the collectible car market, which has strict and generally accepted benchmarks for what qualifies as antique. A 20-yr old car wouldn't be considered antique. According to Wikipedia, the Antique Automobile Club of America puts that line at 45 years.
Google searches for "Antique Server Club of America" and "Antique Video Game Club of America" didn't return any useful results, so we're on our own to decide what constitutes antique. But it will always be relative. A 50-yr old house is practically new. A 50-yr old piece of furniture is old. A 50-yr old car is antique. A 50-yr old computer is historical.
In a statement released by the Vatican Today, it was announced that his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI will step down with immediate effect. When asked for a reason, a spokesman for his former holiness suggested that he would like to spend more time with his wife and children.
The only reason to restrict password length is to facilitate an inside job. Passwords should go up to 300 characters.
I don't know how likely that really is, but how else do you explain it? 8 or 12 characters max in a password? 300 is getting silly, but 30 is certainly reasonable. Are they trying to save bits?
Well yeah. But the issue is having to change passwords every month, not the length or complexity of your password.
And if you want a password of regular letters A to Z, 8 characters in length, why shouldn't I be able to use a longer pass phrase with special characters? That some people want an 8 characters password is in no way an arguement that an 8 characters max should be the rule.
And in this situation, it doesn't matter anyway. If I had to use a system that required a password change every month, I'd be writting it down. Most places I've worked required password changes every 90 days. It usually takes about 3 weeks before I remember to type the new password before trying the old one. So changing password every month for me == yellow sticky on the monitor.
Actually, that's good for the user, as it stops the FUD that's most posts in this discussions are riddled with.
Want to have a secure passwords? Pick an 8 character reasonable one (not a dictionary word, but no pure randomness either). Not longer, you'll just forget it, or be tempted to reuse.
Oh the arrogance. How do you know what I'm likely to remember or forget? And exactly 8 charaters, but no dictionary words, or combinations of words, and no dictionary words with the obvious substitions (1 for i, 0 for o, etc), and no pure randomness. How many combinations does that leave? Not enough.
And what about my personal method of generating hard to guess/crack but easy (for me) to remember passwords? That requires more than 8 characters, special characters, etc. The more restrictions put on passwords, the easier they are to guess, the easier they are to crack (just exclude all the options that break the rules), and they harder they are to remember.
blizzard uses case insensitive passwords, it's fun since their games are probably the most targeted by hackers, I know they have authenticators and they lock the account as soon as they detect a suspicious login but I still don't see any reason on why they don't use case sensitive passwords
Thinking about case-insensitive passwords makes my brain hurt.
Who is going to waste that power on winning a bet?
That depends how much money is riding on that bet. If you have a bet that pays a hundred billion dollars to you if Ron Paul wins the presidential election, then you have a little bit of incentive to throw things Ron Paul's way.
But even with that crazy amount (what market is going to cover your hundred billion dollar bet?) I contend you can still gain more money through corporate subsidies, defense contracts, military action, MFN status, etc. by controlling who gets in to the White House.
If you come back and say, it's not about fixing the election and controlling who wins, it's just about winning a bet on who you think will win, then the whole debate is a non-story. That's not market manipulation, that's just plain old winning a bet.
There are 2 things at issue here. One is arbitrage--taking advantage of the difference between 2 markets. For example, if one market has Obama as the underdog with a bigger payout and another has Romney as the underdog with a bigger payout, and you're pretty sure (99+%) one of those 2 will win, you bet the underdog in both markets and you win no matter what the outcome of the election.
This is an old concept that is well researched. It's basically a solved problem, not interesting.
The other issue is a combination of effecting the prediction market while effecting the thing being predicted to improve your expected outcome. And this is where his case studies make zero sense. If you can control who will be the next president (to the extent that you're willing to put billions of dollars on the line), you have so much more to gain through the natural exercise of presidential power.
For years a password that was at least eight characters long and included mixed-case letters, at least one number, and one non-alphanumeric symbol was considered relatively strong.
The relationship between password length and password strength is old news.
But don't tell users, tell the programmers and system admins. I regularly encounter systems where max password length is 12 or fewer characters. For some reason there are also systems that don't allow characters other than letters and numbers in passwords.
Let us make longer, more secure passwords. Let us use special characters, unicode, tabs and spaces!
I'd second that. It will help him in a lot of his other classes as well.
I thought about suggesting getting him hooked on Mudding as a way to learn touch typing (nothing like a fast-paced, text based, hack-and-slash game to keep his eyes on the screen and fingers on the keyboard), but that would not help him in any of his other classes.
If you are in the Metro-Boston area, or trust your child in Cambridge for the summer, Harvard Summer School admits high school students and has 2 good courses this summer: "Great Ideas in Computer Science with Java" and "Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Using Java." The later sounds like a better match if you're worried about courses that are too simple or slow-paced. "Building Mobile Applications" may be more compelling than more traditional programming courses, but has a higher barrier in terms of prerequisite programming experience and required hardware. http://www.summer.harvard.edu/courses/subject/computer-science http://www.summer.harvard.edu/programs/secondary-school
Unfortunately, if he is not near or cannot get to Cambridge, MA, USA, there does not seem to be any good distance courses offered this summer.
Also, Harvard's CS50, Introduction to Computer Science, is available online. This includes lecture video, hand-outs, problem sets, and quizzes. This is a good option if he is truly a self-starter and will allow him to work at his own pace. This is not the usual online tutorial. This is the same lectures and materials presented to students of Harvard College and the University Extension. http://cs50.tv/
At one point the CS50 lectures were also available on iTunes. I don't know if this is still true.
Slashdot Mirror
After that I quit. I hear they are using Access 95 with VBA.
I think you're trying to be funny (or at least sarcastic) but the last time I worked on a system that stored multiple values in a field as delimted string--as this guy proposes storing mutiple authors and keywords--was for a late 90s dotcom running a web site off of an Access 97 mdb.
Maybe you should factor in the usage pattern and instance counts as well.
Someone's bio might appear in how many articles? A few hundred? And how often will the bio be updated? A couple of times a year? So, updating a bio comes down to touching a few hundred records a few times a year. Compare that with thousands of accesses per day and you've suddenly tipped the scale.
That's exactly the sort of answer I was looking for. Thank you. (Actually, I'd expect most bios get updated only a handful of times over the life of the author. You start with first publications as a grad student, then you leave school, maybe change jobs a couple of times, maybe a few notable achievements, then the author dies.)
That is the sort of design considerations I'd like to read about. That would give a useful comparison between platforms. As it is, this article boils down to "I went NoSQL over RDMS, because...well, just because. I went Amazon over something else because it's easier for my idiot client to administer."
Which, along with his horrible Java vs. C# comparison, makes Jeff Cogswell officially the Slashdot contributor with the worst analytical skills.
OK, that's what I thought. Well, first, for anyone who hasn't read or doesn't remember that "Java vs. C#" thing, don't go back and read it now. Save your time, it's horrible.
Now, for the current article, isn't designing a database all about trade-offs? E.g. Indexes make it easier to find stuff, but then make extra work (updating indexes) when adding stuff. It's about balancing reading and writing, speed and maintenance, etc. And it seems like this guy has only thought about pulling out a single article to the exclusion of everything else.
Do we just not understand DynamoDB? How does this system pull all the articles by a certain author or with a certain keyword? What if they need to update an author's bio? With categories stored within the article object, how does he enforce integrity, so all "general relativity" articles end up with "general relativity" and not a mix of GR, Gen Rel, g relativity, etc?
What happens when they want to add full text search? Or pictures to articles? That 64k limit would seem like a deal breaker. 64k that includes EVERYTHING about an article--abstract, full text, authors and bios, etc.
My first thought was, this does not make much sense. Then I thought, well, I work with old skool RDMS, and I just don't get NoSQL. But now I think, naw, this guy really doesn't know enough to merit the level of attention his blatherings get on /.
As someone whose work and thinking are firmly planted in traditional RDMS, a few of those decisions did not make sense.
I understand what he's saying about normalized tables for author, keywords, and categories. But then when he has to build and maintain index tables for author, keyword, and categories, doesn't that negate any advantage of not having those tables?
I understand he's designed things to easy retrieval of articles, but it seems the trade-offs on other functions are too great. It's nice an author's bio is right there in the article object, but when it's time to update the bio, that does mean going through and touching every article by that author?
I've I got a bunch of similar examples, and I would not be at all surprised if they all boiled down to 'I don't understand what this guy is doing,' but basically, isn't NoSQL strength in dealing with dynamic content and in this example, serving static articles, the choice between NoSQL and traditional RDMS essentially up to personal preference?
One complaint conservatives about liberals is that they tend to try to outlaw stuff reactively. The EPA comes to mind, forbidding property owners certain uses of their land.
Oh yeah, that wacky liberal who gave us the EPA. What was his name again, that pot smoking, Grateful Dead following hippie?
Richard Nixon.
That Nixon is now considered a liberal is all the proof I need that US politics are truely farked beyond all recognition.
Most of "TFA" is actually complaining (legitmately) about the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web, which is a tangent (in the strictest sense) to the book review.
I disagree that subby's complaints in regards to cooking instruction on the web are legitimate.
1) I don't see subby complaining about cooking instruction. I see subby complaining about recipes.
2) You don't learn how to cook from recipes any more than you'd learn basic physics from the latest journal articles.
3) Like you learn basic physics from a text book, subby should learn how to cook from a cook book. Any decent cook book will cover those basics not included in every recipe. Once you learn how to cook, then you can read a recipe, just like how once you have the basics down, then you can understand a physics journal article.
In Soviet Russia, sharks with lasers cook YOU!
(I'm so ashamed.)
Most people just dump a can into a pan or throw something into the microwave.
Cooking is a skill that takes time and study. Actually, some youtube videos are pretty good guides to the basics. If you want to REALLY learn culinary basics, you either have to take a class or make a lot of crappy meals first. With cooking, like most things worth doing, you have to PRACTICE.
Judging a recipe based on what a complete newbie does the first time is like judging a programming language based on what a complete newbie can do with a single man page or help entry.
If you want to learn how to cook, you at least need a cook book, not a single recipe. Any decent cook book will cover all those basics that don't including in every recipe because we don't want 100 page recipes for boiling pasta.
Subby's popper recipes didn't cover all the details of preparing the peppers. They also didn't get in to sharpening knives, calibrating the oven, measuring dry ingredients, and scores of other details. A really detailed recipe to meet subby's requirements would be a short novel for even the simplest dish.
What a newbie does with 1 run of a recipe is a near useless metric. What a newbie does with a little practice, for example on the fifth time on the same recipe, is a better measure.
I've seen some crap here, but this one takes the cake.
Is this a book review or subby's adventures in cooking? And if it is a book review, is that book a cook book?
Why is someone who can't cook going on about recipes on the web? It's like someone whose last science class was 'Physics for Poets' picking up the latest journal from the American Physical Society and complaining about the articles.
If you're a complete physics newbie, you don't learn by picking up the latest journal, you learn by picking up a text book. If you're a cooking newbie, you don't learn from recipes, you learn from a cook book. Any decent cook book will have all the background and additional information not included in the recipes.
Subby doesn't want good directions, subby wants useless directions.
Let's use the recipe example. So instead of "preheat oven to 350," every recipe begins with 2 pages on measuring the temperature in and calibrating your oven. And instead of a list of ingredients with the required amounts, you get a dissertation on the difference between dry measure and liquid measure, with conversion between teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, etc. So the simplest recipe turns in to a novelette.
And that is repeated for every single recipe. Of course all that extra information isn't needed 99% of the time. Is that what you want subby? 100 page recipes for jalapeños poppers?
And WTF? Jalapeños poppers? Are in training for be a chef at TGIF? How many pieces of flair are you wearing right now?
Yes, a good cook book should talk about how to clean and chop vegetables, should talk about different cuts of meat, should talk about technique, should cover how to calibrate your heat sources. And it should cover all those things ONCE. Not in every recipe.
I submit 1) the test of a good recipe is not what the complete noob can the first time preparing that recipe. A better test is what the complete noob can do with the 5th time preparing that recipe.
Is the test of a programming language book or tutorial the first program created by a newbie?
And 2) subby should grow up, be a man (or woman) and skip the gloves when preparing jalapeños. They're not that hot.
The basic gist of the book is that starting roughly 30 years ago, linguists and educational theorists decided that teaching grammar and prescriptive rules (arbitrary rules, they might say!) is not necessary.
Arbitrary is not the same as not necessary. The grammer rules of any language are absolutely arbitrary.
Whether we drive on the left or the right side of the road is arbitrary. But it is still necessary to teach new drivers on which side of the road to drive.
Fire up a virtual machine every time someone emails you a document, and then move that document over to the virtual machine (after it books), open up your Office suite, and then move the document back.
Man, that is sure convenient.
Why would you do it that way? When I read the VM suggestion, I thought it basically meant live in the VM full time. There is a post above where a person used an XP VM in Win7 for a legacy app that wouldn't run in his Win7 set up. But that was one app, not an office suite.
If you're using MS Office for everything, including Outlook for email, and you're using a VM so you can change hardware by moving the VM instead of reinstalling Office, why not fire up the VM as soon as Windows boots and put all your apps in there?
I mean, 1) you're going to spend so much time in the VM, you might as well stay in, and 2) you've done the work of making your system easy to restore to get around reinstalling Office, why not take advantage and make all your software as easy to restore?
Moving files between levels of virtualization wouldn't be an issue. You pay a price at start up, as the OS and VM boot, but a small price. And I'm in the minority as someone who still shuts down PCs. Don't most folk use sleep or hibernate, or for a desktop, just leave it one all the time?
I've only used VMs on beefy servers, never on consumer desktop or laptop hardware. Is there a performance reason you wouldn't live in the VM full time? The top level OS could be light; the only thing it is doing is handling the VM (and passing off messages between the VM and outside world? I don't know where VMs live on your OSI model.).
Anyway, I just had an issue with MS Office 2010 where my wife's HD crashed, I reinstalled (I just back up data, because you can always reinstall software, right?), then her MB went, and when reinstalling on a new machine and trying to register, it got denied as too many installs. This is legal, paid for, copy of Office.
So I downloaded a crack.
On a site that I sell stuff on (restricted to handmade and vintage), vintage is defined as at least 20 years old. It is still going to feel strange putting up these Genesis games there soon that I picked up a while back at Goodwill. But, they are old enough to qualify, so why not?
IANAEIA (I am not an expert in antiquities) but, the definition of "antique" will depend on what the thing is. Generally, the things the change and get old fast, become antiques fast. This server is about 10~12 years old. As another poster noted, the contemporary OS is only one version past EOL.
Cell phones--with a new generation coming out every 6 or 9 months--might be antique at 10 years. Game systems--with a new generation every few years, but with large leaps in capabilities between generations--might be antique at 20 years. So the PS1, XBox, Dreamcast are old. NES, Intellivision, Coleco are antique. Genesis is right along that line, as production went in to the late 1990s. I wouldn't criticize you for labeling Genesis games or console antique, but again, I am not an expert.
Servers (in my mind) have a similar timeline. 10 years past release is old. 20 years is antique. While Subby is running this server as an historical demonstration, there are certainly business running the same model for daily operations.
These gray areas exist because we don't have a mature market for these devices (as far as I know). Consider the collectible car market, which has strict and generally accepted benchmarks for what qualifies as antique. A 20-yr old car wouldn't be considered antique. According to Wikipedia, the Antique Automobile Club of America puts that line at 45 years.
Google searches for "Antique Server Club of America" and "Antique Video Game Club of America" didn't return any useful results, so we're on our own to decide what constitutes antique. But it will always be relative. A 50-yr old house is practically new. A 50-yr old piece of furniture is old. A 50-yr old car is antique. A 50-yr old computer is historical.
This thing ain't vintage. It's just old.
Hang on to it for 10 years. Then it might be vintage.
I surprised this hasn't been suggested.
In a statement released by the Vatican Today, it was announced that his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI will step down with immediate effect. When asked for a reason, a spokesman for his former holiness suggested that he would like to spend more time with his wife and children.
I did nazi that coming.
The only reason to restrict password length is to facilitate an inside job. Passwords should go up to 300 characters.
I don't know how likely that really is, but how else do you explain it? 8 or 12 characters max in a password? 300 is getting silly, but 30 is certainly reasonable. Are they trying to save bits?
Well yeah. But the issue is having to change passwords every month, not the length or complexity of your password.
And if you want a password of regular letters A to Z, 8 characters in length, why shouldn't I be able to use a longer pass phrase with special characters? That some people want an 8 characters password is in no way an arguement that an 8 characters max should be the rule.
And in this situation, it doesn't matter anyway. If I had to use a system that required a password change every month, I'd be writting it down. Most places I've worked required password changes every 90 days. It usually takes about 3 weeks before I remember to type the new password before trying the old one. So changing password every month for me == yellow sticky on the monitor.
Actually, that's good for the user, as it stops the FUD that's most posts in this discussions are riddled with.
Want to have a secure passwords? Pick an 8 character reasonable one (not a dictionary word, but no pure randomness either). Not longer, you'll just forget it, or be tempted to reuse.
Oh the arrogance. How do you know what I'm likely to remember or forget? And exactly 8 charaters, but no dictionary words, or combinations of words, and no dictionary words with the obvious substitions (1 for i, 0 for o, etc), and no pure randomness. How many combinations does that leave? Not enough.
And what about my personal method of generating hard to guess/crack but easy (for me) to remember passwords? That requires more than 8 characters, special characters, etc. The more restrictions put on passwords, the easier they are to guess, the easier they are to crack (just exclude all the options that break the rules), and they harder they are to remember.
That they are cloaking their communications, is not only proof of alien intelligence, but a clear sign of hostile intent.
We must attack before they do.
blizzard uses case insensitive passwords, it's fun since their games are probably the most targeted by hackers, I know they have authenticators and they lock the account as soon as they detect a suspicious login but I still don't see any reason on why they don't use case sensitive passwords
Thinking about case-insensitive passwords makes my brain hurt.
Who is going to waste that power on winning a bet?
That depends how much money is riding on that bet. If you have a bet that pays a hundred billion dollars to you if Ron Paul wins the presidential election, then you have a little bit of incentive to throw things Ron Paul's way.
But even with that crazy amount (what market is going to cover your hundred billion dollar bet?) I contend you can still gain more money through corporate subsidies, defense contracts, military action, MFN status, etc. by controlling who gets in to the White House.
If you come back and say, it's not about fixing the election and controlling who wins, it's just about winning a bet on who you think will win, then the whole debate is a non-story. That's not market manipulation, that's just plain old winning a bet.
There are 2 things at issue here. One is arbitrage--taking advantage of the difference between 2 markets. For example, if one market has Obama as the underdog with a bigger payout and another has Romney as the underdog with a bigger payout, and you're pretty sure (99+%) one of those 2 will win, you bet the underdog in both markets and you win no matter what the outcome of the election.
This is an old concept that is well researched. It's basically a solved problem, not interesting.
The other issue is a combination of effecting the prediction market while effecting the thing being predicted to improve your expected outcome. And this is where his case studies make zero sense. If you can control who will be the next president (to the extent that you're willing to put billions of dollars on the line), you have so much more to gain through the natural exercise of presidential power.
For years a password that was at least eight characters long and included mixed-case letters, at least one number, and one non-alphanumeric symbol was considered relatively strong.
Yes, and those years were 1999 to 2004.
The relationship between password length and password strength is old news.
But don't tell users, tell the programmers and system admins. I regularly encounter systems where max password length is 12 or fewer characters. For some reason there are also systems that don't allow characters other than letters and numbers in passwords.
Let us make longer, more secure passwords. Let us use special characters, unicode, tabs and spaces!
I'd second that. It will help him in a lot of his other classes as well.
I thought about suggesting getting him hooked on Mudding as a way to learn touch typing (nothing like a fast-paced, text based, hack-and-slash game to keep his eyes on the screen and fingers on the keyboard), but that would not help him in any of his other classes.
If you are in the Metro-Boston area, or trust your child in Cambridge for the summer, Harvard Summer School admits high school students and has 2 good courses this summer: "Great Ideas in Computer Science with Java" and "Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Using Java." The later sounds like a better match if you're worried about courses that are too simple or slow-paced. "Building Mobile Applications" may be more compelling than more traditional programming courses, but has a higher barrier in terms of prerequisite programming experience and required hardware.
http://www.summer.harvard.edu/courses/subject/computer-science
http://www.summer.harvard.edu/programs/secondary-school
Unfortunately, if he is not near or cannot get to Cambridge, MA, USA, there does not seem to be any good distance courses offered this summer.
Also, Harvard's CS50, Introduction to Computer Science, is available online. This includes lecture video, hand-outs, problem sets, and quizzes. This is a good option if he is truly a self-starter and will allow him to work at his own pace. This is not the usual online tutorial. This is the same lectures and materials presented to students of Harvard College and the University Extension.
http://cs50.tv/
At one point the CS50 lectures were also available on iTunes. I don't know if this is still true.