the unusual thing was having any laptop with me at all. A $500 phone is cheaper than a $500 phone + a $500 laptop + a $30 wifi dongle and considerably easier to carry.
I almost always have my phone on me. I almost never carry a laptop around. I almost always want email access (although in reality I can go anything up to 18 hours without;)
~ced
Re:What's the problem
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
>> I would imagine that while they are on patrol, they are pretty aware of their surroundings. Besides, I'm pretty sure if a mortar round went off next to them, it wouldn't matter if they were listening to an mp3 or not.
To me that's the real issue here. Are these devices a negative operational influence? Listening to MP3s on patrol means you're not listening to the environment, you're not focussing on your mission, you are more likely to be caught unawares.
Listening to MP3s in the barracks on the other hand is relaxation. Go for it.
Whoa?! In the 80s you were crammed together watching a film for a titshot in the last 15 minutes? Shit, in the 80s at 17yo I was watching hard core in the canteen - we're talking champagne bottles fat end first, and that was technically the foreplay.
No wonder the British armed forces are man for man the finest on the planet..
Re:Honor our soldiers in battle
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually your soliders are increasing the risks to my life. If every American soldier fell over dead tomorrow I would be personally delighted.
If there was a big button to press to make it happen, I'd be joining the queue.
Support your troops? No.
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
Hang on? Asking members of the armed forces to obey the law is the act of a traitor?
My Treo replacement has onboard wi-fi, in addition to standard GSM, 3G (whatever protocol that uses) and bluetooth.
In London for four days a couple of weeks ago, with a non-wifi capable company laptop, I used my phone for all my net access over an open hotspot (we presume provided by the company hosting us - 13 floors up it's unlikely to be the coffee shop down the street).
Phone + wifi = internet without mobile phone company charges. Given I'm on a $7/MB data plan (but 50 minutes a day free voice calls) wifi is the difference to me between internet and no internet.
Incidentally I switched from the Treo because I want a phone that has built-in PDA capabilities, not a PDA that can make phone calls. I went for the Nokia E70 - full keyboard, the web browser is superb (unless you open multiple concurrent pages), capable PDA and a top-end phone.
On the other hand, I've listened to OK Computer many times, usually without random shuffle, and I've never picked up an underlying album-wide story and message.
On my portable music player I have 3-4 tracks from that album in my two most common playlists and love them as tracks; I almost never listen to the album itself.
Maybe there is a message and the album represents a coherent body of work. Frankly it's wasted on me.
Tell them to do some proper TCO calculations on monitors. LCD = less power + less heat (= less aircon) = far cheaper to run. I've worked for two companies now that have (independently) demonstrated cost savings by switching to LCD monitors.
Quite how flight cancellations, excessive passenger waiting times and increased staff levels are protecting BAAs profits I really struggle to understand.
The airlines are losing a massive amount of money from this. BAA is losing significant sums.
And yes, BAA have increased staff levels in the airports.
I seem to be unusual. I don't work for the shareholders.
Sure, they own the company. Sure, they benefit from any dividends the company issues. Sure, I may even be one.
However, they come pretty far down my priority list. I put them below the customers, my colleagues, myself. I even put them below people like the local communities affected by my company's operations, the governmental bodies we're involved with.
A lot of that can be argued back to business continuity, business benefit and thus long term shareholder benefit. But frankly I'm not going to piss all over (some of) my colleagues just to boost the EPS by a point.
If this company goes down, I get a job at another. Given the willingness of the company to shaft me and my colleagues just to ensure the bonuses of the board, I refuse to give 100% loyalty. It would be foolish. And that means I can not always put the shareholders first.
Depends how badly they're getting the shit kicked out of them in Paddington Green.
Anyway, anybody stupid enough to think bombing aircraft is an appropriate response to British foreign policy is probably going to screw up somewhere along their security chain.
This is going to make approximately fuck all difference to terrorism, have a negligible impact on child protection and screw over a lot of potentially innocent people. I don't like that.
The Government have noticed this 'loophole' and are seeking to increase the penalty for failing to provide a key to five years where there is a strong suspicion of kiddie porn.
I could phrase this differently: If a policeman doesn't like you he can pick a random binary file from your hard disk, ask you for the decryption key, tell a judge it's clearly kiddie porn, and because it's a random binary file (and thus not encrypted) you get five years inside.
I'm hoping the Lords give this proposed law a good kicking.
Then the smallest program as measured by any given method may not the actual smallest. The argument exist that it is the measurement method that is flawed rather than the theory.
Admittedly this makes the theory particularly complicated to prove..
Then I guess we agree that the measurement mechanism doesn't matter. I still disagree with your conclusion that this invalidates Hutter's theory.
He is expressing the optimal AI move as the smallest program possible; I think that how you measure that size is not relevant to that theory. I don't see that lacking an appropriate measurement approach free from arbitrary constraints invalidates the theory.
You're thinking of size in code terms. Realign your size measurement to use (e.g.) function points, or processing cycles, or some other non-language-dependent factor.
The alleged intent was to explode them over the Atlantic to make determination of the cause far more difficult, and thus increase the chances of successful repeat operations.
If you don't know the explosives are liquid, you wont ban liquids from the flights..
If I was CEO and my developers were not using these tools, I'd be looking to hire some high quality developers.
Fact: Code reviews improve code quality. Fact: 80% of the cost of bespoke software occurs during maintenance. Fact: No software developer is perfect.
Maybe you're arrogant enough to think you don't need these tools. I say that you do need them, your teams need them, and that you should be doing proper code reviews as well.
One of my software engineers has just updated the automated code build (which runs every hour, which personally I find too infrequent) to log metrics generated by these tools. If any issues are found, emails go out to the whole team, including senior managers. People know not to check in bad code; if they do so by accident they get immediate feedback that it needs to be changed.
We're not arseholes about it, generally good natured ribbing is the worse that'll happen. Sometimes a quiet word is needed. But if you want or need to maintain a complex codebase, these tools greatly reduce the cost and time needed.
I buy Windows licences for my PCs almost exclusively so I can play games on them. Everything else I do I can find alternates for.
If all the games for the PC also run on the Mac (through Cider) then I'll put some serious thought into buying a Mac for my next home computer. If a lot of people make that switch, then the PC gaming market will reduce in size, the Mac gaming market will increase in size, and games developers will put effort into making their games run optimally on both.
Of course, what we really need is Microsoft to stop creating DirectX and start creating open extensions to OpenGL so that developers can code against a single cross-platform API. But that would be altruistic and I can understand them not wanting to do that. I can understand far less game developers not requiring it..
I agree this isn't easy. It's very unusual to find a situation where (at least one) DBA doesn't have access to production data.
However, you can and should take measures to minimise the number of people with such access. The developer doesn't need and should never have production access. Same for the build engineer. The DBA shouldn't have access to anything non-database, and the system admin shouldn't have access to the database. Everything should be audited and reviewed.
It's not about eliminating risk, it's about reducing risk. Trusting your IT staff is a poor start to such a risk mitigation strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just a little too fucking obscure. Try reminding us all what was in that particular show?
the unusual thing was having any laptop with me at all. A $500 phone is cheaper than a $500 phone + a $500 laptop + a $30 wifi dongle and considerably easier to carry.
I almost always have my phone on me. I almost never carry a laptop around. I almost always want email access (although in reality I can go anything up to 18 hours without
~ced
>> I would imagine that while they are on patrol, they are pretty aware of their surroundings. Besides, I'm pretty sure if a mortar round went off next to them, it wouldn't matter if they were listening to an mp3 or not.
To me that's the real issue here. Are these devices a negative operational influence? Listening to MP3s on patrol means you're not listening to the environment, you're not focussing on your mission, you are more likely to be caught unawares.
Listening to MP3s in the barracks on the other hand is relaxation. Go for it.
Whoa?! In the 80s you were crammed together watching a film for a titshot in the last 15 minutes? Shit, in the 80s at 17yo I was watching hard core in the canteen - we're talking champagne bottles fat end first, and that was technically the foreplay.
No wonder the British armed forces are man for man the finest on the planet..
Actually your soliders are increasing the risks to my life. If every American soldier fell over dead tomorrow I would be personally delighted.
If there was a big button to press to make it happen, I'd be joining the queue.
Support your troops? No.
Hang on? Asking members of the armed forces to obey the law is the act of a traitor?
You need to go find a dictionary.
My Treo replacement has onboard wi-fi, in addition to standard GSM, 3G (whatever protocol that uses) and bluetooth.
In London for four days a couple of weeks ago, with a non-wifi capable company laptop, I used my phone for all my net access over an open hotspot (we presume provided by the company hosting us - 13 floors up it's unlikely to be the coffee shop down the street).
Phone + wifi = internet without mobile phone company charges. Given I'm on a $7/MB data plan (but 50 minutes a day free voice calls) wifi is the difference to me between internet and no internet.
Incidentally I switched from the Treo because I want a phone that has built-in PDA capabilities, not a PDA that can make phone calls. I went for the Nokia E70 - full keyboard, the web browser is superb (unless you open multiple concurrent pages), capable PDA and a top-end phone.
On the other hand, I've listened to OK Computer many times, usually without random shuffle, and I've never picked up an underlying album-wide story and message.
On my portable music player I have 3-4 tracks from that album in my two most common playlists and love them as tracks; I almost never listen to the album itself.
Maybe there is a message and the album represents a coherent body of work. Frankly it's wasted on me.
Tell them to do some proper TCO calculations on monitors. LCD = less power + less heat (= less aircon) = far cheaper to run. I've worked for two companies now that have (independently) demonstrated cost savings by switching to LCD monitors.
Quite how flight cancellations, excessive passenger waiting times and increased staff levels are protecting BAAs profits I really struggle to understand.
The airlines are losing a massive amount of money from this. BAA is losing significant sums.
And yes, BAA have increased staff levels in the airports.
I seem to be unusual. I don't work for the shareholders.
Sure, they own the company. Sure, they benefit from any dividends the company issues. Sure, I may even be one.
However, they come pretty far down my priority list. I put them below the customers, my colleagues, myself. I even put them below people like the local communities affected by my company's operations, the governmental bodies we're involved with.
A lot of that can be argued back to business continuity, business benefit and thus long term shareholder benefit. But frankly I'm not going to piss all over (some of) my colleagues just to boost the EPS by a point.
If this company goes down, I get a job at another. Given the willingness of the company to shaft me and my colleagues just to ensure the bonuses of the board, I refuse to give 100% loyalty. It would be foolish. And that means I can not always put the shareholders first.
Maybe if company executives had acted responsibly, maturely and honestly there would have been no need for SOX.
Depends how badly they're getting the shit kicked out of them in Paddington Green.
Anyway, anybody stupid enough to think bombing aircraft is an appropriate response to British foreign policy is probably going to screw up somewhere along their security chain.
This is going to make approximately fuck all difference to terrorism, have a negligible impact on child protection and screw over a lot of potentially innocent people. I don't like that.
The Government have noticed this 'loophole' and are seeking to increase the penalty for failing to provide a key to five years where there is a strong suspicion of kiddie porn.
I could phrase this differently: If a policeman doesn't like you he can pick a random binary file from your hard disk, ask you for the decryption key, tell a judge it's clearly kiddie porn, and because it's a random binary file (and thus not encrypted) you get five years inside.
I'm hoping the Lords give this proposed law a good kicking.
Then the smallest program as measured by any given method may not the actual smallest. The argument exist that it is the measurement method that is flawed rather than the theory.
Admittedly this makes the theory particularly complicated to prove..
Then I guess we agree that the measurement mechanism doesn't matter. I still disagree with your conclusion that this invalidates Hutter's theory.
He is expressing the optimal AI move as the smallest program possible; I think that how you measure that size is not relevant to that theory. I don't see that lacking an appropriate measurement approach free from arbitrary constraints invalidates the theory.
You're thinking of size in code terms. Realign your size measurement to use (e.g.) function points, or processing cycles, or some other non-language-dependent factor.
Why drink them? The old 'condom up the arse' trick that drug couriers use is just as effective here.
Better yet, it's a threat not being addressed by the existing security checks..
The alleged intent was to explode them over the Atlantic to make determination of the cause far more difficult, and thus increase the chances of successful repeat operations.
If you don't know the explosives are liquid, you wont ban liquids from the flights..
>> Live is [tough], wear a bullet proof vest.
I'd rather shoot a policeman as a precaution before he got me.
I disagree with your logic. If the gamers have Macs, then even if they're playing games written for Win32, they are not PC gamers.
I don't think anybody's claiming this is a silver bullet.
What this does represent is an opportunity for incremental improvement.
Or just keep doing the same stupid thing that doesn't work very well. Your choice.
If I was CEO and my developers were not using these tools, I'd be looking to hire some high quality developers.
Fact: Code reviews improve code quality.
Fact: 80% of the cost of bespoke software occurs during maintenance.
Fact: No software developer is perfect.
Maybe you're arrogant enough to think you don't need these tools. I say that you do need them, your teams need them, and that you should be doing proper code reviews as well.
One of my software engineers has just updated the automated code build (which runs every hour, which personally I find too infrequent) to log metrics generated by these tools. If any issues are found, emails go out to the whole team, including senior managers. People know not to check in bad code; if they do so by accident they get immediate feedback that it needs to be changed.
We're not arseholes about it, generally good natured ribbing is the worse that'll happen. Sometimes a quiet word is needed. But if you want or need to maintain a complex codebase, these tools greatly reduce the cost and time needed.
But as asked, "Does this matter".
I buy Windows licences for my PCs almost exclusively so I can play games on them. Everything else I do I can find alternates for.
If all the games for the PC also run on the Mac (through Cider) then I'll put some serious thought into buying a Mac for my next home computer. If a lot of people make that switch, then the PC gaming market will reduce in size, the Mac gaming market will increase in size, and games developers will put effort into making their games run optimally on both.
Of course, what we really need is Microsoft to stop creating DirectX and start creating open extensions to OpenGL so that developers can code against a single cross-platform API. But that would be altruistic and I can understand them not wanting to do that. I can understand far less game developers not requiring it..
I agree this isn't easy. It's very unusual to find a situation where (at least one) DBA doesn't have access to production data.
However, you can and should take measures to minimise the number of people with such access. The developer doesn't need and should never have production access. Same for the build engineer. The DBA shouldn't have access to anything non-database, and the system admin shouldn't have access to the database. Everything should be audited and reviewed.
It's not about eliminating risk, it's about reducing risk. Trusting your IT staff is a poor start to such a risk mitigation strategy.