Some kind soul should write a virus that holds your files hostage until Firefox is installed and is set as the default browser
They already have. It's called Internet Explorer. Until you turn it off, it sits there on your system, threatening to download malware, send your private data to strangers, and install viruses that will wipe out all of your files....
"These people are themselves in a unique position to positively affect others' lives - they can talk to others, perhaps in a school setting, about the consequences of immitating art."
You're right - I expect the motion picture industry to have them on a continual lecture circuit around the schools of England, demonstrating vividly the direct and traumatic consequences of intellectual property theft, just as soon as they're out of intensive care.
Seriously, you think the root cause of this tragic accident was down to two people imitating art??? If only they'd stuck to appreciating the creative act passively, they'd be safe today. You're right, in your own way, of course, but... just very, very weird...
More seriously, I think you'll find there's a middle ground somewhere between openly mocking two very seriously injured, if misguided, people, and fundraising for them. I don't think you have to argue that they need take no responsibility for their actions at all, to suggest that people refrain from making comments saying that people this stupid deserve to suffer through the pain these two must have.
It does matter what laws you have. The Data Protection Act makes it the company's responsibility to ensure that data is not stolen, even by employees. There's no room for the company to use as a defense "But they're senior employees! I have to be able to trust them!". The law would respond: "no, you have to have protocols in place, or ensure that you don't have the information in the first place, that mean you don't have to trust them."
The very existence of the DPA in the UK forces organisations that are gathering personal information to take responsibility for ensuring that it can't be stolen or abused.
Re:So what? Parentheses made it well structured.
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
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· Score: 1
Parentheses indicate additional information that might be useful but is not necessary to the sentence. That's all. As a Germanic language, we're more inclined towards comas for our phrase grouping, but in actuality, English punctuation is really just a way of writing pauses of various lengths. Most importantly, (In English (we don't group (subclauses and (noun-, adjective- or verb-) phrases) inside parentheses) to aid stack-based parsing). They're not structural hiearachical elements like programmers and mathematicians use. They're a device that shows that the content could be set aside, and may not be of interest or relevance to all readers. In other words, they are a tool for a dithering writer - someone who doesn't know whether to include a phrase in their writing or not.
This is precisely why they're frowned upon in published writing - because if you're writing to an audience, it's considered polite to make the decisions about which words to include or not in the final draft before you publish it. Parentheses are a way of deferring that decision to the reader, who is apt to be confused by their being forced to play editor at the same time as they're trying to understand what you're saying to them.
Re:What the fuck (is wrong with) you?
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
·
· Score: 1
The reaction you're responding to may seem over the top, but as a former editor, I'm not surprised your parenthesizing causes some people to react violently against your writing. Let me try and explain why...
Your parenthetical obsession shows that you clearly know, and have identified, the parts of your writing which add no value to what you have to say. Why not do your reader a favour and remove them? It is a standard editing technique to go through text deleting all the words that add no real meaning, and then stitch together what's left with punctuation and conjunctions. If I were editing your work, all the parentheticals would be struck out on the first pass and never seen again.
If you believe that they do have value, then don't stick them between apologetic parentheses - it's like you're constantly muttering under your breath in the middle of sentences. The 'body language' of your writing speaks of insecurity and uncertainty.
The most obvious offender in the article is the sentence "It is (currently) the only (up to date) printed guide for the Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) Level 1 exam.". Your qualifications add nothing but doubt to the reader's mind. The fact that your statement is true now but may not always be so is a given - nobody will hold anything against you for not being able to see into the future. So the "(currently)" drops out immediately. The fact that there are other guides which are out of date, presumably, deserves some mention, but your "(up to date)" qualifier feels apologetic and weak. What was wrong with saying "It is the only guide to the current LPIC Level 1 exam"?
Have some confidence, and don't over-qualify all your sentences, and you'll find that people can read you much more smoothly.
That's okay then. So long as the abuses were being investigated and people were getting punished, journalists can ignore the story and move on. You know, that's a great idea. Woodward and Bernstein should have noted that people in the FBI were aware of the Watergate break-in and were investigating it, and shouldn't have bothered chasing down any leads they found - after all, the government had it in hand.
Or perhaps it is the very fact that the media is watching, the fact that they do report on misdeeds, that ensures that when things are done wrong (whether as a result of misguided individuals misinterpreting orders or just getting their jollies, or as a more systematic matter of policy) that the investigations which are carried out are not allowed to overlook facts, ignore issues, or reach unsustainable verdicts. Do you think the fact that breaches of international law were being conducted by US soldiers on duty in Iraq (since they involve breaches of the Geneve convention, you could even call them war crimes) is something which the US electorate, in whose name the US military operates, should not be aware of? Do you think it would have been the US military's choice to have the Abu Ghraib incidents publicised? Do you think that if journalists had not been prepared to investigate the truth of every statement on the subject issued by the US military and government, that the military would not have taken the opportunity to lie about events in the prison? If you disagree on any of these points, then you and I share a very different view on what's important, and on how bureaucracies behave when not held to account.
Bringing this back on topic, this story is about someone abusing their role as a journalist. Plenty of people seem to hold journalists in general in pretty low esteem. And there are plenty of hacks out there who spend their days redrafting press releases and calling that journalism and that sucks, it really does. But what you can't argue is that it isn't the role of journalism to scrutinise the behaviour of governments. That isn't 'liberal bias', that's doing their job. It's something more journalists should be doing.
You owe the very fact that yuou are able to debate the issues of the Abu Ghraib case with any confidence that the facts you cite may be true, to the scrutiny of the government which journalism performs.
Morally repugnant acts undertaken in front of the world by soldiers who are supposed to be carrying out the democratic will of the American people, in breach of international law - and the question of how and when they will be held account for those actions - seem like they add up to a pretty big news story to me. Bigger than the fact that there are individual evil people in the world who individually do evil things and they sometimes get caught and punished for doing so. Reporting on specific incidents of domestic crime should not generally be the stuff of frontpage NYT news, because it isn't world-changing.
The fact that, to you, the immigration status of a murderer (or an accused murderer - I'm not familiar with the case, so have no idea if a verdict has been handed down) seems to be of greater import than their mental state, or possibly even guilt, leads me to suspect that you believe that this appalling individual act should have been reported more widely to draw attention to what you maybe perceive as a wider problem with illegal immigrants. Sadly, that simply suggests you have a fundamental problem figuring out what facts are relevant, and makes me glad that it's not you in charge of editorial policy on a major international newspaper.
they don't stock many models in the store - just the base model, and a configuration called 'Mac Mini Ultimate', which has the 1.42GHz G4, 80G HD, 512M RAM, DVD Combo drive, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth. Basically, all the options except the 1G RAM upgrade.
Actually, I believe it's paying a lot of money to acquire a piece of paper that tells other people that you've listened to professors saying nothing useful...
Yup - bought my Mac Mini in the brand new Birmingham (UK) Apple Store on Friday night, within a couple of hours of Tiger shipping. In the box, a 'drop-in' Tiger upgrade DVD, with which I upgraded the mini as soon as it had finished booting and acquired its first ethernet address.
And Tiger runs fine on the Mini, albeit without _all_ the core Image bells and whistles. Still the cheapest way for me to upgrade the CPU, graphics, memory, hard disk and optical drive of my old Sawtooth G4 to something more inkeeping with the media-centric uses I'm now putting my mac...
Yeah, man... I know. Firefly might have had great wit and flair and character, an immersive vision of an interesting future universe, but it didn't need all that - the ONE thing that made it was the fact that they had no sound in space.
I mean, wow - the genius it must have taken to think that up! the boldness! the cheek! to go against every sci fi preconception and cliche and instead present a world where sound didn't propagate across a vacuum! Wow. It blew me away. I used to just rewind the DVD so I could watch - and hear - those silent space bits over and over again...
Oh no, hang on. That's not true. I watched Firefly for the writing, the performances, and the plots. If (and I say IF) the film has sound in space, you know what? I reckon the plots and the characters will still be just as good.
"How about our Scientists rescue the Hubble Telescope first, something we know works, then worry about the quantum chip later."
No, but first, our scientists have to clean their teeth, then our scientists will be asleep for the next eight hours. Once our scientists have got up in the morning, they'll have a bowl of cheerios and then read the paper for a bit. Then maybe they can tackle the Hubble telescope problem (although the fact that all n million of them are trying to write on the blackboard at the same time does mean they won't make much progress. And the biologists have to sit around twiddling their thumbs because there's not much they can do to help). After Hubble, there's some promising work on cancer they need to finish up, before they can get on with a bit of geology.
Hopefully, someday soon, our scientists will realise that they can get much more done if they allow small groups of themselves to concentrate on different things, so they can make progress in different fields at the same time. In the mean time, though, you're right. They're all wasting their time on this pointless quantum computing nonsense.
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means...
Possibly this is a secret trigger code. Some terrorist cell is waiting for a posting by 'stupidnickname' on the 26th of April. If it uses the word 'Baseball', then the attack should be by land - if 'basketball', then by sea...
Or, maybe you have a rare psychiatric condition which causes you to substitute the words 'inside baseball' whenever you mean 'legal arguments'...
Whatever, the bizarre use of language almost caused me to completely overlook the wild generalisation and crazed extrapolation of the rest of the post. Well done!
watermarking with large enough keys and sufficient redundancy means that if you try that sort of trick on two watermarked files, you do nothing but combine both sets of identifying data into the file and guarantee that both sources get identified.
As the parent you're disagreeing with said, if you take two identical files, and encode two different 1024 bit watermarks into them in some unobtrusive way, the chances are that about 512 bits of watermark-altered information will remain. Those 512 bits will narrow down the range of possible pairs of watermarked files that could have generated that combination to a very small space indeed - possibly just one, if you were careful about which keys you used to do the watermarking.
Maintenance coders typically get asked to do things like this:
- add a button to screen A that does function X - change the layout of screen B so that it shows ALL of the widgets in chronological order
etc.
To do that, you want to start off with a nice diagram of the screens showing which UI elements come from which classes/controls/include files/etc. so that you know where to go and start looking at code.
90% of software design is about putting code in the right place. That means architecture consists, mostly, of telling codemonkeys where to go and put their code. When an architect is attached to a project, they can tell the codemonkeys directly - 'make a class called Foo, give it these methods'. Once the architect's gone, and the codemonkeys are maintaining it, the design documentation is the only hint any of them will get as to where is the _right_ place to put code.
In those situations, nice block diagrams showing which bits of code make which bits of which screens can be a real help.
Open Transport Tycoon? A game that lets you experience the realistic thrills and spills of building up your own business empire in the exciting world of classic Mac OS networking drivers?
Who said it was meant to be a law in the sense of a physical law? It is possible tht the word 'law' is used in fields other than physics and in those fields, it maybe means something else...
Some other examples of eponymous laws that you might want to consider before you yell this about Moore's Law in future:
Metcalfe's Law: the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system Gresham's Law: Bad money drives good money out of circulation Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud
Seems to me that the solution is for 'blacklisting' services to limit their activities to publishing facts which they can stand behind. If an RBL were to list specific IP addresses which had a known history of spam activity, and details of the responsiveness of the netblock owner to complaints about spam, they would be publishing enough information for administrators to make informed decisions about how broadly to set their SMTP traffic filters, without casting any doubt over the honesty or good faith of the operators of systems on any other IP address in the netblock that they haven't specifically named. If an individual sysadmin decides that they want to blackhole the entire netblock because spam is popping up from IPs all over it, and the owner is ignoring complaints, then that is their lookout.
The issue seems to me to be that a blanket RBL listing for a netblock casts a shadow of suspicion over the operators of all IP addresses in the block, because it doesn't include the information about which IP addresses in the block have been positively identified as spammers.
I still think the interesting aspect to this is the fact that administrators who subscribe to RBLs are basically configuring a computer program to 'believe' everything that a publisher prints, and act upon it according to a policy they specify. Would be easy for a court to be confused by a good legal team into the argument that information published automatically by a computer program intended for automatic consumption by another computer program is not being 'published', or that without a human being reading the published RBL, there is nobody to be misled by a factual inaccuracy...
Hmmm... I was puzzled by the phrasing of this question, too. What is the poster trying to get at?
If Symbian/Nokia make System 60 more secure, then that's all very well for phones released after they improve their security, but for phones running older, less secure versions of the platform, it's not really much use. So, presumably, if they do improve the security of System 60, they'll need some way to push out those security enhancements to existing System 60 phones. In other words, the only possible logical approach would be to do both.
So what was the poster trying to imply? That they could add an automatic update system to the OS, and that that would obviate the need for them to make the software more secure? Then what would the automatic update software have to do? How would it improve security?
Or that they can simply make the operating system more secure but only need to release the new version of the OS on newer phones, throwing anyone with an older handset to the wolves whenever a vulnerability is discovered?
I know exactly how you feel, and I know that writing that made you feel a whole lot better. But there's one sentence you wrote that I think you should think about:
"You have forgotten that passwords expire every month (yes, this month too; same as last month, and the month before that also), or that passwords do not magically update across all your applications just because you changed one of them."
You know what that proves? Not that users are stupid, but that computer systems are not designed to be compatible with human beings. Why the hell does the user need to know so many passwords? Why do they have to deal with passwords that expire? Because passwords are a shoddy security bandaid that provide a modicum of security in return for a great deal of pain.
Before we had computer systems, we didn't secure everything individually; each employee in an office might have had a desk drawer they could lock, and there might have been some lockable filing cabinets. In general, the assumption was, if you were in the office, you could get at pretty much anything on anyone's desk. Why the hell are we so paranoid nowadays that we insist on locking everything down behind a password? For real security sensitive issues, why don't we all have access to good, cheap authentication systems that we can attach to computers that rely on physical tokens (like keys, smart cards and the like?)
Software systems need to be a whole lot better before we can blame users for every technical misunderstanding.
Something I've never quite got about that JFK speech. Here's what he actually said:
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
The question that's always bugged me: what were the other things? It always sounds to me like he forgot what he was going to say, almost like the speech comes across as this:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things.. you know... they're on the tip of my tongue... I can't remember... oh, whatever. We choose to do them not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."
Slashdot Mirror
Some kind soul should write a virus that holds your files hostage until Firefox is installed and is set as the default browser
They already have. It's called Internet Explorer. Until you turn it off, it sits there on your system, threatening to download malware, send your private data to strangers, and install viruses that will wipe out all of your files....
"These people are themselves in a unique position to positively affect others' lives - they can talk to others, perhaps in a school setting, about the consequences of immitating art."
You're right - I expect the motion picture industry to have them on a continual lecture circuit around the schools of England, demonstrating vividly the direct and traumatic consequences of intellectual property theft, just as soon as they're out of intensive care.
Seriously, you think the root cause of this tragic accident was down to two people imitating art??? If only they'd stuck to appreciating the creative act passively, they'd be safe today. You're right, in your own way, of course, but... just very, very weird...
More seriously, I think you'll find there's a middle ground somewhere between openly mocking two very seriously injured, if misguided, people, and fundraising for them. I don't think you have to argue that they need take no responsibility for their actions at all, to suggest that people refrain from making comments saying that people this stupid deserve to suffer through the pain these two must have.
Get some perspective.
It does matter what laws you have. The Data Protection Act makes it the company's responsibility to ensure that data is not stolen, even by employees. There's no room for the company to use as a defense "But they're senior employees! I have to be able to trust them!". The law would respond: "no, you have to have protocols in place, or ensure that you don't have the information in the first place, that mean you don't have to trust them."
The very existence of the DPA in the UK forces organisations that are gathering personal information to take responsibility for ensuring that it can't be stolen or abused.
Parentheses indicate additional information that might be useful but is not necessary to the sentence. That's all. As a Germanic language, we're more inclined towards comas for our phrase grouping, but in actuality, English punctuation is really just a way of writing pauses of various lengths. Most importantly, (In English (we don't group (subclauses and (noun-, adjective- or verb-) phrases) inside parentheses) to aid stack-based parsing). They're not structural hiearachical elements like programmers and mathematicians use. They're a device that shows that the content could be set aside, and may not be of interest or relevance to all readers. In other words, they are a tool for a dithering writer - someone who doesn't know whether to include a phrase in their writing or not.
This is precisely why they're frowned upon in published writing - because if you're writing to an audience, it's considered polite to make the decisions about which words to include or not in the final draft before you publish it. Parentheses are a way of deferring that decision to the reader, who is apt to be confused by their being forced to play editor at the same time as they're trying to understand what you're saying to them.
The reaction you're responding to may seem over the top, but as a former editor, I'm not surprised your parenthesizing causes some people to react violently against your writing. Let me try and explain why...
Your parenthetical obsession shows that you clearly know, and have identified, the parts of your writing which add no value to what you have to say. Why not do your reader a favour and remove them? It is a standard editing technique to go through text deleting all the words that add no real meaning, and then stitch together what's left with punctuation and conjunctions. If I were editing your work, all the parentheticals would be struck out on the first pass and never seen again.
If you believe that they do have value, then don't stick them between apologetic parentheses - it's like you're constantly muttering under your breath in the middle of sentences. The 'body language' of your writing speaks of insecurity and uncertainty.
The most obvious offender in the article is the sentence "It is (currently) the only (up to date) printed guide for the Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) Level 1 exam.". Your qualifications add nothing but doubt to the reader's mind. The fact that your statement is true now but may not always be so is a given - nobody will hold anything against you for not being able to see into the future. So the "(currently)" drops out immediately. The fact that there are other guides which are out of date, presumably, deserves some mention, but your "(up to date)" qualifier feels apologetic and weak. What was wrong with saying "It is the only guide to the current LPIC Level 1 exam"?
Have some confidence, and don't over-qualify all your sentences, and you'll find that people can read you much more smoothly.
"That said, I've avoided plenty of accidents simply by being able to swerve unbelievably hard and maintain control of the car"
You, er... you see a lot of accidents in your rear-view mirror, then?
Funny that...
That's okay then. So long as the abuses were being investigated and people were getting punished, journalists can ignore the story and move on. You know, that's a great idea. Woodward and Bernstein should have noted that people in the FBI were aware of the Watergate break-in and were investigating it, and shouldn't have bothered chasing down any leads they found - after all, the government had it in hand.
Or perhaps it is the very fact that the media is watching, the fact that they do report on misdeeds, that ensures that when things are done wrong (whether as a result of misguided individuals misinterpreting orders or just getting their jollies, or as a more systematic matter of policy) that the investigations which are carried out are not allowed to overlook facts, ignore issues, or reach unsustainable verdicts. Do you think the fact that breaches of international law were being conducted by US soldiers on duty in Iraq (since they involve breaches of the Geneve convention, you could even call them war crimes) is something which the US electorate, in whose name the US military operates, should not be aware of? Do you think it would have been the US military's choice to have the Abu Ghraib incidents publicised? Do you think that if journalists had not been prepared to investigate the truth of every statement on the subject issued by the US military and government, that the military would not have taken the opportunity to lie about events in the prison? If you disagree on any of these points, then you and I share a very different view on what's important, and on how bureaucracies behave when not held to account.
Bringing this back on topic, this story is about someone abusing their role as a journalist. Plenty of people seem to hold journalists in general in pretty low esteem. And there are plenty of hacks out there who spend their days redrafting press releases and calling that journalism and that sucks, it really does. But what you can't argue is that it isn't the role of journalism to scrutinise the behaviour of governments. That isn't 'liberal bias', that's doing their job. It's something more journalists should be doing.
You owe the very fact that yuou are able to debate the issues of the Abu Ghraib case with any confidence that the facts you cite may be true, to the scrutiny of the government which journalism performs.
Morally repugnant acts undertaken in front of the world by soldiers who are supposed to be carrying out the democratic will of the American people, in breach of international law - and the question of how and when they will be held account for those actions - seem like they add up to a pretty big news story to me. Bigger than the fact that there are individual evil people in the world who individually do evil things and they sometimes get caught and punished for doing so. Reporting on specific incidents of domestic crime should not generally be the stuff of frontpage NYT news, because it isn't world-changing.
The fact that, to you, the immigration status of a murderer (or an accused murderer - I'm not familiar with the case, so have no idea if a verdict has been handed down) seems to be of greater import than their mental state, or possibly even guilt, leads me to suspect that you believe that this appalling individual act should have been reported more widely to draw attention to what you maybe perceive as a wider problem with illegal immigrants. Sadly, that simply suggests you have a fundamental problem figuring out what facts are relevant, and makes me glad that it's not you in charge of editorial policy on a major international newspaper.
"They just graze and graze and cause automobile accidents"
maybe we shouldn't let the deer drive...
seriously, has it occurred to you that it isn't deer in roads that cause auto accidents, but roads in deer country?
they don't stock many models in the store - just the base model, and a configuration called 'Mac Mini Ultimate', which has the 1.42GHz G4, 80G HD, 512M RAM, DVD Combo drive, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth. Basically, all the options except the 1G RAM upgrade.
I got the Ultimate, of course.
Actually, I believe it's paying a lot of money to acquire a piece of paper that tells other people that you've listened to professors saying nothing useful...
There's a subtle but important difference.
Yup - bought my Mac Mini in the brand new Birmingham (UK) Apple Store on Friday night, within a couple of hours of Tiger shipping. In the box, a 'drop-in' Tiger upgrade DVD, with which I upgraded the mini as soon as it had finished booting and acquired its first ethernet address.
And Tiger runs fine on the Mini, albeit without _all_ the core Image bells and whistles. Still the cheapest way for me to upgrade the CPU, graphics, memory, hard disk and optical drive of my old Sawtooth G4 to something more inkeeping with the media-centric uses I'm now putting my mac...
Cheers for that - helpful response!
:)
Thanks for taking my reply in the spirit in which it was intended
Yeah, man... I know. Firefly might have had great wit and flair and character, an immersive vision of an interesting future universe, but it didn't need all that - the ONE thing that made it was the fact that they had no sound in space.
I mean, wow - the genius it must have taken to think that up! the boldness! the cheek! to go against every sci fi preconception and cliche and instead present a world where sound didn't propagate across a vacuum! Wow. It blew me away. I used to just rewind the DVD so I could watch - and hear - those silent space bits over and over again...
Oh no, hang on. That's not true. I watched Firefly for the writing, the performances, and the plots. If (and I say IF) the film has sound in space, you know what? I reckon the plots and the characters will still be just as good.
Call me crazy...
"How about our Scientists rescue the Hubble Telescope first, something we know works, then worry about the quantum chip later."
No, but first, our scientists have to clean their teeth, then our scientists will be asleep for the next eight hours. Once our scientists have got up in the morning, they'll have a bowl of cheerios and then read the paper for a bit. Then maybe they can tackle the Hubble telescope problem (although the fact that all n million of them are trying to write on the blackboard at the same time does mean they won't make much progress. And the biologists have to sit around twiddling their thumbs because there's not much they can do to help). After Hubble, there's some promising work on cancer they need to finish up, before they can get on with a bit of geology.
Hopefully, someday soon, our scientists will realise that they can get much more done if they allow small groups of themselves to concentrate on different things, so they can make progress in different fields at the same time. In the mean time, though, you're right. They're all wasting their time on this pointless quantum computing nonsense.
Baseball, eh?
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means...
Possibly this is a secret trigger code. Some terrorist cell is waiting for a posting by 'stupidnickname' on the 26th of April. If it uses the word 'Baseball', then the attack should be by land - if 'basketball', then by sea...
Or, maybe you have a rare psychiatric condition which causes you to substitute the words 'inside baseball' whenever you mean 'legal arguments'...
Whatever, the bizarre use of language almost caused me to completely overlook the wild generalisation and crazed extrapolation of the rest of the post. Well done!
watermarking with large enough keys and sufficient redundancy means that if you try that sort of trick on two watermarked files, you do nothing but combine both sets of identifying data into the file and guarantee that both sources get identified.
As the parent you're disagreeing with said, if you take two identical files, and encode two different 1024 bit watermarks into them in some unobtrusive way, the chances are that about 512 bits of watermark-altered information will remain. Those 512 bits will narrow down the range of possible pairs of watermarked files that could have generated that combination to a very small space indeed - possibly just one, if you were careful about which keys you used to do the watermarking.
Maintenance coders typically get asked to do things like this:
- add a button to screen A that does function X
- change the layout of screen B so that it shows ALL of the widgets in chronological order
etc.
To do that, you want to start off with a nice diagram of the screens showing which UI elements come from which classes/controls/include files/etc. so that you know where to go and start looking at code.
90% of software design is about putting code in the right place. That means architecture consists, mostly, of telling codemonkeys where to go and put their code. When an architect is attached to a project, they can tell the codemonkeys directly - 'make a class called Foo, give it these methods'. Once the architect's gone, and the codemonkeys are maintaining it, the design documentation is the only hint any of them will get as to where is the _right_ place to put code.
In those situations, nice block diagrams showing which bits of code make which bits of which screens can be a real help.
Open Transport Tycoon? A game that lets you experience the realistic thrills and spills of building up your own business empire in the exciting world of classic Mac OS networking drivers?
Where do I sign up?
Who said it was meant to be a law in the sense of a physical law? It is possible tht the word 'law' is used in fields other than physics and in those fields, it maybe means something else...
Some other examples of eponymous laws that you might want to consider before you yell this about Moore's Law in future:
Metcalfe's Law: the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system
Gresham's Law: Bad money drives good money out of circulation
Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud
Dilbert-like-engineer: Make sure you have enough redundancy in your population to ensure DNA data integrity
Pointy-haired-boss: thinks . o O ( Hmmm... make sure we have enough redundancies, eh? )
Seems to me that the solution is for 'blacklisting' services to limit their activities to publishing facts which they can stand behind. If an RBL were to list specific IP addresses which had a known history of spam activity, and details of the responsiveness of the netblock owner to complaints about spam, they would be publishing enough information for administrators to make informed decisions about how broadly to set their SMTP traffic filters, without casting any doubt over the honesty or good faith of the operators of systems on any other IP address in the netblock that they haven't specifically named. If an individual sysadmin decides that they want to blackhole the entire netblock because spam is popping up from IPs all over it, and the owner is ignoring complaints, then that is their lookout.
The issue seems to me to be that a blanket RBL listing for a netblock casts a shadow of suspicion over the operators of all IP addresses in the block, because it doesn't include the information about which IP addresses in the block have been positively identified as spammers.
I still think the interesting aspect to this is the fact that administrators who subscribe to RBLs are basically configuring a computer program to 'believe' everything that a publisher prints, and act upon it according to a policy they specify. Would be easy for a court to be confused by a good legal team into the argument that information published automatically by a computer program intended for automatic consumption by another computer program is not being 'published', or that without a human being reading the published RBL, there is nobody to be misled by a factual inaccuracy...
Hmmm... I was puzzled by the phrasing of this question, too. What is the poster trying to get at?
If Symbian/Nokia make System 60 more secure, then that's all very well for phones released after they improve their security, but for phones running older, less secure versions of the platform, it's not really much use. So, presumably, if they do improve the security of System 60, they'll need some way to push out those security enhancements to existing System 60 phones. In other words, the only possible logical approach would be to do both.
So what was the poster trying to imply? That they could add an automatic update system to the OS, and that that would obviate the need for them to make the software more secure? Then what would the automatic update software have to do? How would it improve security?
Or that they can simply make the operating system more secure but only need to release the new version of the OS on newer phones, throwing anyone with an older handset to the wolves whenever a vulnerability is discovered?
Curious logic, to be sure...
I know exactly how you feel, and I know that writing that made you feel a whole lot better. But there's one sentence you wrote that I think you should think about:
"You have forgotten that passwords expire every month (yes, this month too; same as last month, and the month before that also), or that passwords do not magically update across all your applications just because you changed one of them."
You know what that proves? Not that users are stupid, but that computer systems are not designed to be compatible with human beings. Why the hell does the user need to know so many passwords? Why do they have to deal with passwords that expire? Because passwords are a shoddy security bandaid that provide a modicum of security in return for a great deal of pain.
Before we had computer systems, we didn't secure everything individually; each employee in an office might have had a desk drawer they could lock, and there might have been some lockable filing cabinets. In general, the assumption was, if you were in the office, you could get at pretty much anything on anyone's desk. Why the hell are we so paranoid nowadays that we insist on locking everything down behind a password? For real security sensitive issues, why don't we all have access to good, cheap authentication systems that we can attach to computers that rely on physical tokens (like keys, smart cards and the like?)
Software systems need to be a whole lot better before we can blame users for every technical misunderstanding.
Something I've never quite got about that JFK speech. Here's what he actually said:
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and
do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
The question that's always bugged me: what were the other things? It always sounds to me like he forgot what he was going to say, almost like the speech comes across as this:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things.. you know... they're on the tip of my tongue... I can't remember... oh, whatever. We choose to do them not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."