(How embarassing that he has the same name as me. No relation, I assure you. The men from my gene pool are smart enough to spank their monkeys without getting caught!)
Oh, DUH! (Takes massive caffiene dose, jumpstarts brain.) Let's put the emphasis on FORMER math geek. Or let's say my input parser mistranslated. I deserved to be soundly flogged for this one.
That's a great example, but I'll those bank accounts still use a PIN or password. The author of the article was proposing that passwords should be thrown away entirely in place of suspicion engines.
My bank monitors behavior too. If I order a bunch of expensive stuff that doesn't fit my typical patterns, we get a phone call, usually the same day, to ask if we did in fact make the purchases. This happened the last time I put together a new PC and had to order a bunch of components from different places. I'm not necessarily opposed to this kind of monitoring, but I don't see it replacing passwords anytime soon.
To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, a system can authenticate you with one of three things: something you know, something you have, something you are, or some combination of those somethings. The author of that article says we should wean ourselves from passwords, but doesn't offer any realistic alternatives other than "suspicion engines", which don't meet any of Schneier's criteria, although they sound like a weak attempt to add a new one: "Something you do". Would anyone here feel comfortable trusting their bank account or Paypal account to a suspicion engine? Thanks, but no thanks.
Sure, I was joking. But there's a point hidden inside the joke: that our children are woefully ignorant on many subjects. Civics. Politics. Geography. Math. Science... ad nauseam.
Write Once, Run Anywhere is the slogan, and an admirable ideal to attempt to reach.
Java's motto shouldn't be "Write once run anywhere" - it should be "Write once, test everywhere". An admirable goal, true, but don't kid yourself about what it really means.
Testing doesn't have to cost a lot of money, and if you user a boilerplate contract, you don't have to involve lawyers. My group just outsourced some work like this, and we had a formal acceptance test that we conducted ourselves. It fixed some minor problems and we got what we wanted; above all, it didn't add a lot of cost to the product.
But turn it around... how much does it cost you to pay a contractor and then get something that doesn't come close to meeting your needs?
Next time you have a comprehensive acceptance test. YOU conduct the test, or you designate a third party. You do not allow the contractor to conduct the test. You test everything that matters - features, performance, capacity. Whatever. You spell this out in the contract and you don't pay until it passes.
I suppose in a way Prince of Persia:Sands of Time ruined me.
I loved that game, but I had the same complaint about switching camera angles as you make about Burnout3: sometimes I'm running along and then - usually when passing through a doorway - the camera angle will suddenly switch 180 degrees and I lose control of my character. Or, worse, I twitch the control stick and suddenly he reverses direction. Frustrating at the best of times, but downright infuriating when it happens during a melee.
By the way, I'm now playing my way through the PoP sequel, The Warrior Within. Not as good a game, although I am enjoying it immensely.
Big companies call this 6sigma or TQM or some other such things.
Six Sigma and Total Quality Management are not research programs, they are quality improvement programs. The programs themselves are not central to core business, but are very much about core business and improving it.
I've been subject to both at different companies. TQM was the biggest load of horseshit I've ever seen, at least as "implemented" by the company I worked at. Six Sigma is a different story - my current company does Lean Six Sigma, which is all about process improvement, and I've seen it make a substantial benefit to the way we do things. 6Sigma is a buzzword I actually like.
True independent-study research programs look more like the one at 3M.
Not only is it a dupe, but the announcement was so widely anticipated and so widely reported that you'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard about it! Way to stay on top of timely news, samzen.
Yahoo's being a giant asshole about it, probably because it sets a dangerous precedent for them. If they start conceding that access to one's e-mail passes on to one's survivors, it opens all kinds of cans-o-worms for them, like having to maintain contents of accounts for the deceased, having to deal with lawyers and probate courts and so on. I don't agree with their position, but I understand it.
Maybe him 'keeping a journal' was facilitated by e-mailing himself via yahoo.
I have a friend who did this. Set up a Hotmail account, separate from the account she used for daily e-mail. Whenever she sent something of significance, she'd CC the Hotmail account.
She had a long e-mail correspondence with a man she met by chat, and they became fast friends. They exchanged life stories. They are both older people, and my friend loves to write, so there were many very long and detailed e-mails. Each one CC:ed to Hotmail.
Unfortunately - and you can probably see where this is going - Hotmail puts your account on hold if you don't log on every so often, 90 days or so. They will also flush your e-mail down the bit bucket. My friend was devastated one day to log onto the Hotmail account, and find every word of her e-mail deleted because her account had been idle too long.
I don't know why she didn't figure out something was wrong; I didn't want to pour salt in the wound by asking if she was getting bounce messages from Hotmail, and why she ignored them. Perhaps Hotmail doesn't send bounce notices when e-mail arrives at an inactive account (a policy that makes sense if you think about the number of inactive accounts times the amount of spam sent to each).
Moral of the story: Don't rely on your e-mail service as your one and only store of valuable information.
The last time I opened an account, my bank asked me two things: first, did I want to give my wife rights of survivorship on my account, so that it would transition to her in the event of my death; second, did I want to name a benificiary who would receive the funds on my death if my wife was unavailable or unwilling to receive the account. I forget the exact distinction between these two designations - survivorship and beneficiary - but the point is that they asked the question as part of opening the account, and I would assume similar designations would apply when you open a safe deposit box account.
E-mail providers try to act as if the rights of survivors are unimportant, but as situations like this arise, where e-mail accounts have significant value to survivors, the providers are going to have a harder time ignoring survivorship issues. One day - like banks - they may have to allow survivorship designations to be made anytime one opens an account.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about a mixed metaphor? We can burn that bridge when we come to it.
Oh, and do your own self-flogging. And not at work, mind you.
You mean like this guy?
(How embarassing that he has the same name as me. No relation, I assure you. The men from my gene pool are smart enough to spank their monkeys without getting caught!)
Oh, DUH! (Takes massive caffiene dose, jumpstarts brain.) Let's put the emphasis on FORMER math geek. Or let's say my input parser mistranslated. I deserved to be soundly flogged for this one.
So... ninety nine zeros... Google over ten?
Just doesn't have the same irony, now does it?
Oh. Never mind...
A googol is ten to the one hundredth power, written as a one followed by one hundred zeros.
Ninety nine zeros, the name of the blog, is a googol minus one.
And now we have Google, minus one. One named "Mark".
Maybe it's just because I'm a former math geek, but I just love the way this worked out...
That's a great example, but I'll those bank accounts still use a PIN or password. The author of the article was proposing that passwords should be thrown away entirely in place of suspicion engines.
My bank monitors behavior too. If I order a bunch of expensive stuff that doesn't fit my typical patterns, we get a phone call, usually the same day, to ask if we did in fact make the purchases. This happened the last time I put together a new PC and had to order a bunch of components from different places. I'm not necessarily opposed to this kind of monitoring, but I don't see it replacing passwords anytime soon.
To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, a system can authenticate you with one of three things: something you know, something you have, something you are, or some combination of those somethings. The author of that article says we should wean ourselves from passwords, but doesn't offer any realistic alternatives other than "suspicion engines", which don't meet any of Schneier's criteria, although they sound like a weak attempt to add a new one: "Something you do". Would anyone here feel comfortable trusting their bank account or Paypal account to a suspicion engine? Thanks, but no thanks.
Read Asimov's short story "Buy Jupiter" - advertising on a truly large scale.
Sure, I was joking. But there's a point hidden inside the joke: that our children are woefully ignorant on many subjects. Civics. Politics. Geography. Math. Science... ad nauseam.
...eighty percent of the same group, when asked to locate the USA on a map of North America, pointed to Canada.
Write Once, Run Anywhere is the slogan, and an admirable ideal to attempt to reach.
Java's motto shouldn't be "Write once run anywhere" - it should be "Write once, test everywhere". An admirable goal, true, but don't kid yourself about what it really means.
Testing doesn't have to cost a lot of money, and if you user a boilerplate contract, you don't have to involve lawyers. My group just outsourced some work like this, and we had a formal acceptance test that we conducted ourselves. It fixed some minor problems and we got what we wanted; above all, it didn't add a lot of cost to the product.
But turn it around... how much does it cost you to pay a contractor and then get something that doesn't come close to meeting your needs?
Next time you have a comprehensive acceptance test. YOU conduct the test, or you designate a third party. You do not allow the contractor to conduct the test. You test everything that matters - features, performance, capacity. Whatever. You spell this out in the contract and you don't pay until it passes.
I suppose in a way Prince of Persia:Sands of Time ruined me.
I loved that game, but I had the same complaint about switching camera angles as you make about Burnout3: sometimes I'm running along and then - usually when passing through a doorway - the camera angle will suddenly switch 180 degrees and I lose control of my character. Or, worse, I twitch the control stick and suddenly he reverses direction. Frustrating at the best of times, but downright infuriating when it happens during a melee.
By the way, I'm now playing my way through the PoP sequel, The Warrior Within. Not as good a game, although I am enjoying it immensely.
Big companies call this 6sigma or TQM or some other such things.
Six Sigma and Total Quality Management are not research programs, they are quality improvement programs. The programs themselves are not central to core business, but are very much about core business and improving it.
I've been subject to both at different companies. TQM was the biggest load of horseshit I've ever seen, at least as "implemented" by the company I worked at. Six Sigma is a different story - my current company does Lean Six Sigma, which is all about process improvement, and I've seen it make a substantial benefit to the way we do things. 6Sigma is a buzzword I actually like.
True independent-study research programs look more like the one at 3M.
Hmmm...how much does a good massage bunny cost?
Twenty five bucks, same as in town.
Perhaps the photo looks good because it's owned by Corbis and was scanned from the original negatives?
To live in France you'd also need four to six weeks off starting in August.
Hustler Boy
If you want to hustle boys, I guess that's your business, Father.
Like poking a badger with a spoon?
How about installing tits on a boar?
worse than this story n /. would be a dupe of this story on /.
Give them time, son, give them time...
Not only is it a dupe, but the announcement was so widely anticipated and so widely reported that you'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard about it! Way to stay on top of timely news, samzen.
Yahoo's being a giant asshole about it, probably because it sets a dangerous precedent for them. If they start conceding that access to one's e-mail passes on to one's survivors, it opens all kinds of cans-o-worms for them, like having to maintain contents of accounts for the deceased, having to deal with lawyers and probate courts and so on. I don't agree with their position, but I understand it.
Maybe him 'keeping a journal' was facilitated by e-mailing himself via yahoo.
I have a friend who did this. Set up a Hotmail account, separate from the account she used for daily e-mail. Whenever she sent something of significance, she'd CC the Hotmail account.
She had a long e-mail correspondence with a man she met by chat, and they became fast friends. They exchanged life stories. They are both older people, and my friend loves to write, so there were many very long and detailed e-mails. Each one CC:ed to Hotmail.
Unfortunately - and you can probably see where this is going - Hotmail puts your account on hold if you don't log on every so often, 90 days or so. They will also flush your e-mail down the bit bucket. My friend was devastated one day to log onto the Hotmail account, and find every word of her e-mail deleted because her account had been idle too long.
I don't know why she didn't figure out something was wrong; I didn't want to pour salt in the wound by asking if she was getting bounce messages from Hotmail, and why she ignored them. Perhaps Hotmail doesn't send bounce notices when e-mail arrives at an inactive account (a policy that makes sense if you think about the number of inactive accounts times the amount of spam sent to each).
Moral of the story: Don't rely on your e-mail service as your one and only store of valuable information.
The last time I opened an account, my bank asked me two things: first, did I want to give my wife rights of survivorship on my account, so that it would transition to her in the event of my death; second, did I want to name a benificiary who would receive the funds on my death if my wife was unavailable or unwilling to receive the account. I forget the exact distinction between these two designations - survivorship and beneficiary - but the point is that they asked the question as part of opening the account, and I would assume similar designations would apply when you open a safe deposit box account.
E-mail providers try to act as if the rights of survivors are unimportant, but as situations like this arise, where e-mail accounts have significant value to survivors, the providers are going to have a harder time ignoring survivorship issues. One day - like banks - they may have to allow survivorship designations to be made anytime one opens an account.