Forced to be on winodws by the employer. Cygwin to the rescue. Most people think I am running a linux machine with dozens of shells all over the screens. I use grep, awk, sed, find, comm and join a lot.
The fast food companies spend billions of dollars doing research on the taste and habits of young children to get them hooked to their product for a lifetime. What is surprising is the few that don't get hooked and the few that somehow develop healthy eating habits later in life.
Thinking back about the things that I enjoyed as a child, it seems quite ridiculous one would even eat them. I grew up in rural South India, with tamarind trees (Tamarindus indica), a kind of wild tamarind (kodukkaapuli, Pithecellobium dulce), palm trees on public land and mango, jackfruit, coconut trees in private lands. We throw stones at the trees to knock down the fruit and eat it, usually without bothering to wash it! The tender tamarind fruit is barely edible, not sweet and has bitter overtones. Only goats eat the wild tamarind. Jackfruit and coconut cant be knocked down by thrown stones, nor can they be eaten by children without help from adults. Mango is good, but usually you would get chased by farmers and the trees would be guarded by their wives. But if you manage to get some mangoes stolen, you eat like a king, even if the actual fruit is underripe and tastes like bitter gourd. Palm fruit can't be knocked down. But if you beg the tappers who climb palm trees to tap the sap to make toddy they will throw down a few palm fruits. Delicious pulp inside, but don't tell Mom, the toddy tappers are low caste. Somehow we love them as children and grow to mistreat them as adults.
Why did we like them so much? There were no alternatives. Most of the items you see in the dessert menu of Indian restaurants are made once a year, the rest three or four times a year.
Let the users define using AdBlock protocol what their individual ad acceptance policy is. "No video" "No audio" "Not more than 100% of the bandwidth of payload data." Whatever. Let the users also define keywords like, "Looking for: digital camera, used pick-up truck" "Interested in: traveling, wine, gadgets"
Take it as a browser agent string from the user, or as app setting from the user, and deliver it to the web sites. Let the web sites obey these policies and deliver ads.
Most uses would let unobstrusive ads through. I have had the privilege to block slashdot ads for ages. I never do. Same goes for other sites I support. Give us the control. Not some unelected third party ombudsmen.
It would cost AT LEAST 5 billion to recreate the code being used.
Amount of testing needed to achieve the same level of reliability and interoperability ? Could easily top 500 billion dollars.
No, it is not hyperbole. Look at the expense most companies are going through to maintain ageing old code running in mainframes or the code running on WinXP and IE6 and ActiveX control. If you look at the man years used to develop that code, it might be X. To rip it out and replace it? It has no relationship to X. It all depends on how many other modules depend on it.
It is true for everything, not just code. Cost of constructing Tappan Zee bridge would bear no relationship to the cost of blowing it down and rebuilding a replacement in situ. The cost of service interruption alone is going to exceed the original investment by several times over.
The new credit cards in the US with chips are good, but why chip and signature?
Because the signature (on a debit card) makes it a credit transaction allowing the credit card company to charge 2 to 5% commission on the sale. If you authorize a debit card with a PIN instead of a signature the credit card company gets a flat fee of 25 cents.
It clearly shows the Government over reach and onerous regulation is crippling the industry. There are genes capable of fighting the ill effects of tobacco. Just give enough cigarettes to enough generations the genes incapable of handling tobacco would have exited the gene pool quietly, (quiet except for some coughing and wheezing) and the future generations would have become strong, capable of handling copious quantities of cigarette smoke and other pollutants.
This is what Government does for you, makes our future generations weaker, and makes our current generation of companies weaker.
Any regulation thought up the Washington bureaucrats the takes away the potential profits of a legitimate product is nothing but theft.
Remember the constitutions folks, it starts: We, the corporations of America, in Order to form a more perfect economy...
The car analogy breaks down here. A computer is not like a car. It is something like a package of five engines, 5 sets of tires, six transmissions, several seats, a few truck beds, and some chassis elements. You can put together anything from a pick up truck to a bulldozer to a formula 1 race car with the provided kit. And coding is how you put together whatever you want. Most people put together only golf carts. But companies put together specialized vehicles and without knowing coding the managers would manage it very inefficiently.
According to microsoft policies Windows 7 is already out of mainline support. It will have extended support till 2020. But according to its own policies, win7 should be getting only security updates, no "improvements" nor "enhancements". So in a just and fair world, you should get only critical security updates alone for Windows 7.
But, as Scar told the mouse, "Life isn't fair, is it?".
We keep looking for less developed nations to out source for cheap labor. What happens once we run out of places where we can find cheap labor? To some extent we would train highly intelligent animals (dolphins to hunt for mines, may be monkeys to take geiger counters into nuclear power plants destroyed by tsunamis). But it is very difficult to find animals intelligent enough to do the work and stunted enough to accept our peanuts.
At this point we would start looking for laborers outside the home planet. I am sure there are small advance scenario planning teams planning on exploiting the minerals of the asteroid belt and may be out sourcing possibilities of non earth civilizations in Morgan Stanley, Citi and Credit Suisse. Never under estimate their fiendishness, if there is some remote 1 in trillion chance, they will take it. Why wouldn't they? It is heads they win, tails the public bails them out.
Anyway other advanced civilizations will be looking for animals intelligent enough to do their dirty jobs. And we might get picked for it. So they will come looking for us, we don't have to go looking for them.
We can expect to be treated by them exactly the way Cortez, Magellen, Columbus and Pizzaro treated the remote cultures they encountered.
You are probably right, you obviously know more about WWII than I do. Monty was an arrogant jerk. He never accepted Ike as his CO, and believed he should have been named the supreme commander. He was a veritable peacock, strutting.
Know anything about a POW camp where the hacked the church organ? It had an DC motor connected to the blower but it could also be pedal operated. The US pows hacked it so that it could be pedaled and made to work as a generator to power their smuggled in radio?
The hedgerow taming attachment to the tanks are quite well known to most WW-II buffs. But there were many thousands of such local mods.
One of the best ones I have heard about is the hacking of the Dutch telephone system by the insiders. They had special "area codes" that bypassed main trunk exchanges but allowed the resistance fighters to communicate using the regular telephone system. If Gen Montgomery knew about it or had used it, his Operation Market Garden (movie: A Bridge Too Far) might have gone differently, they last bridge group might have learned the the German General Model and his panzer divisions were being held in that area as reserve and for refitting and they were in a position to cut off the lines of communication. Need to look it up.
Banks used to make money by lending money to other risk takers, while the bank itself preferred the low risk-sure return interest income. Then in USA they removed the barrier between banking and investing. So the banks started investing other people's money, going for higher return for higher risk business. Then they realized, they have the entire civilization in their control, their high risk bets are so thoroughly mingled with world financial systems, they will not go bankrupt no matter what they do. The governments must bail them out. So now they are in a situation, "make high risk bets, keep the profits when they are good, pass on the losses to the society when they go bad". Morgan-Stanley into commodity trading, shipping the aluminium back and forth between two warehouses and somehow make money off that insane thing. At this point who needs technology? All they need are diabolical supervillains to imagine crazy schemes, lobbyists to make those schemes legal, and lawyers to implement those schemes.
At this point their stranglehold is on the governments and the financial systems. Not technology, not bond-trading. Others can innovate and might even be much better than the banks in assessing risk/reward ratio. But as long as the others have to eat their losses, the banks will come out ahead.
It is not a bug there is no techie in the board. It is by design. They need diabolical monsters from the comic book super villains in the board, not techies.
They seem to have take a food additive, replaced some sulphur atoms with hydrogen and created a synthetic compound they claim to be safe and non caustic.
Flow battery stores the energy in electrolytes in external tanks. Thus at some point we could have gas stations dispensing "charged" electrolytes making way for very rapid recharging.
As usual for any battery technology it works in the lab and the product is X+10 years away, where X is the current year.
According to the article, per my understanding, the cookie is stored as a name-path-domain to value map. The path and domain are not authenticated to make sure site A does not set a cookie fraudulently for site B. Another problem seems to be, the browsers present all the values associated with the name to the web site, even the cookies not set by that site.
To mitigate it browsers should present only the cookies set by a site back to that site. This might break lots of sites. It is very common for the sites to set a cookie and then load a page in another domain which reads the cookie. Many authentication schemes depend on this behavior.
Even browsers start authenticating cookie paths or maintain tables of which cookies came from which site and maintain them in different sandboxes, many big sites would not work right.
Yes, it is not encouraged much in slashdot, but still I clicked on the link provided in the summary to, gasp!, read the fine article. That site popped a banner that said, "This site is using cookies to improve your web experience!".
However, not all companies follow detailed auditing processes. The primary reason, Kaul said, is the speed at which software is being released to the marketplace. It necessitates an "agile approach," resulting in millions of lines of code being worked on and checked into production every minute.
"And, right now, everyone is saying, we did not do it," Kaul said in an interview with Computerworld.
Kaul is definitely wrong here. Established mechanical engineering giants, especially from Germany, leave extensive audit trails. Come on, guys these people set up tables and recorded the names, addresses and parents of people being sent to concentration camps. Any vendor who sells software to Volkswagen knows how much testing and auditing they do before upgrading the software. Further auto companies operate on very long product cycle. Not like the web operators. It is alleged that Facebook did not even have a source code control system till after it went public!
They are an auto company. Strike one. They are German. Strike two. Even agile development has strong change management paper trials. Strike three. We can nail the engineer who checked in/merged/pulled the change.
Most of the actual codes that disabled the emission controls would have legitimate use during development cycle. Typically there will be a switch to put the engine in a baseline test mode, to gather baseline data. The test engineers would turn it all off, get a sanity check baseline runs made. Then they will turn on various switches and turn various knobs to fine tune the best values trading off power and efficiency to reduce emissions. So the actual code turning off emission control is not a big deal.
What would be a big deal however is the code that detects whether the car is in test bench or on the road. Apparently it uses steering input and other such details. So that code block is the interesting part. Proper audit of the code changes, pull request authorizations would nail the engineer who actually did the dirty deed. But would there be code review meeting/minutes, comments fingering higher management?
This scandal will have some salutary effect in engineers who manage code, they would refuse to merge or pull such cheating code changes because it would leave their fingerprints indelibly for ever. They might even add comments in code covering their tails fingering the actual perp in the higher management.
Just like "don't use goto", or "don't use threads", etc., these guidelines and recommendations are really great to prevent beginners from making hard to spot errors, but all those variations and features exist for a reason and have a use.
Nobody uses GOTO anymore. With event driven programming and call back functions, it all spaghetti code strewn with COME FROM statements, effectively.
Jay Leno is more widely known as the stand up show host and less widely known for his motor/motor cycle collection.
But he also wrote a more serious column for Car and Driver. He once talked about the decline of American motor cycle industry. Famous names like Indian Chief etc and how they all foundered. Basically they produced machines which were difficult to maintain at good condition. Every three thousand miles people had to disassemble the cylinder head and decarbonize them and reset the valves and timing etc etc. The honchos in the companies were proud their customers like to get their hands dirty, they like working on these engines. Jay Leno said, "no, we don't like messing with these engines. We want to ride and have fun. But it was impossible to get good performance without doing all these things. We were forced to do it because your engines were crappy". When Honda and Yamaha started making reliable machines that delivered good performance for long times without these messy requirements, they just ate the lunch of the old style American motorcycle manufacturers. Only Harley survived, but it was touch and go for even for them.
People like making things that work. Ages ago the only way to do it was to make your own PCB. Now a days with one day turn around, most people would like to outsource making the pcb to make sure there are no accidental contacts, no mistakenly erased and redrawn line not making full contact, making sure all the holes are drilled all the way through and there is no delamination etc. Hand made PCBs are the equivalent of your motorcycle rider decarbonizing the engine head instead of riding fast on the wide open highways of America.
The study seems to have spiked the results by offering breakfast burritos to the participants as they wait for their turn to be sampled. Further the few people who could not be detected using this method were the ones who did not partake in the free burritos. So basically this study just confirms common knowledge about people releasing bacterial clouds.
Slashdot Mirror
Forced to be on winodws by the employer. Cygwin to the rescue. Most people think I am running a linux machine with dozens of shells all over the screens. I use grep, awk, sed, find, comm and join a lot.
DropBox? GoogleDocs? It is just a file to be saved in some saved location right?
Thinking back about the things that I enjoyed as a child, it seems quite ridiculous one would even eat them. I grew up in rural South India, with tamarind trees (Tamarindus indica), a kind of wild tamarind (kodukkaapuli, Pithecellobium dulce), palm trees on public land and mango, jackfruit, coconut trees in private lands. We throw stones at the trees to knock down the fruit and eat it, usually without bothering to wash it! The tender tamarind fruit is barely edible, not sweet and has bitter overtones. Only goats eat the wild tamarind. Jackfruit and coconut cant be knocked down by thrown stones, nor can they be eaten by children without help from adults. Mango is good, but usually you would get chased by farmers and the trees would be guarded by their wives. But if you manage to get some mangoes stolen, you eat like a king, even if the actual fruit is underripe and tastes like bitter gourd. Palm fruit can't be knocked down. But if you beg the tappers who climb palm trees to tap the sap to make toddy they will throw down a few palm fruits. Delicious pulp inside, but don't tell Mom, the toddy tappers are low caste. Somehow we love them as children and grow to mistreat them as adults.
Why did we like them so much? There were no alternatives. Most of the items you see in the dessert menu of Indian restaurants are made once a year, the rest three or four times a year.
Take it as a browser agent string from the user, or as app setting from the user, and deliver it to the web sites. Let the web sites obey these policies and deliver ads.
Most uses would let unobstrusive ads through. I have had the privilege to block slashdot ads for ages. I never do. Same goes for other sites I support. Give us the control. Not some unelected third party ombudsmen.
Amount of testing needed to achieve the same level of reliability and interoperability ? Could easily top 500 billion dollars.
No, it is not hyperbole. Look at the expense most companies are going through to maintain ageing old code running in mainframes or the code running on WinXP and IE6 and ActiveX control. If you look at the man years used to develop that code, it might be X. To rip it out and replace it? It has no relationship to X. It all depends on how many other modules depend on it.
It is true for everything, not just code. Cost of constructing Tappan Zee bridge would bear no relationship to the cost of blowing it down and rebuilding a replacement in situ. The cost of service interruption alone is going to exceed the original investment by several times over.
i wonder.
The new credit cards in the US with chips are good, but why chip and signature?
Because the signature (on a debit card) makes it a credit transaction allowing the credit card company to charge 2 to 5% commission on the sale. If you authorize a debit card with a PIN instead of a signature the credit card company gets a flat fee of 25 cents.
... so can everybody. Chinese, Russians, Bulgarians, Ukranians, Germans....
This is what Government does for you, makes our future generations weaker, and makes our current generation of companies weaker.
Any regulation thought up the Washington bureaucrats the takes away the potential profits of a legitimate product is nothing but theft.
Remember the constitutions folks, it starts: We, the corporations of America, in Order to form a more perfect economy ...
The car analogy breaks down here. A computer is not like a car. It is something like a package of five engines, 5 sets of tires, six transmissions, several seats, a few truck beds, and some chassis elements. You can put together anything from a pick up truck to a bulldozer to a formula 1 race car with the provided kit. And coding is how you put together whatever you want. Most people put together only golf carts. But companies put together specialized vehicles and without knowing coding the managers would manage it very inefficiently.
But, as Scar told the mouse, "Life isn't fair, is it?".
At this point we would start looking for laborers outside the home planet. I am sure there are small advance scenario planning teams planning on exploiting the minerals of the asteroid belt and may be out sourcing possibilities of non earth civilizations in Morgan Stanley, Citi and Credit Suisse. Never under estimate their fiendishness, if there is some remote 1 in trillion chance, they will take it. Why wouldn't they? It is heads they win, tails the public bails them out.
Anyway other advanced civilizations will be looking for animals intelligent enough to do their dirty jobs. And we might get picked for it. So they will come looking for us, we don't have to go looking for them.
We can expect to be treated by them exactly the way Cortez, Magellen, Columbus and Pizzaro treated the remote cultures they encountered.
Know anything about a POW camp where the hacked the church organ? It had an DC motor connected to the blower but it could also be pedal operated. The US pows hacked it so that it could be pedaled and made to work as a generator to power their smuggled in radio?
One of the best ones I have heard about is the hacking of the Dutch telephone system by the insiders. They had special "area codes" that bypassed main trunk exchanges but allowed the resistance fighters to communicate using the regular telephone system. If Gen Montgomery knew about it or had used it, his Operation Market Garden (movie: A Bridge Too Far) might have gone differently, they last bridge group might have learned the the German General Model and his panzer divisions were being held in that area as reserve and for refitting and they were in a position to cut off the lines of communication. Need to look it up.
Even for stationary applications the technology is a decade away from the market, as usual.
At this point their stranglehold is on the governments and the financial systems. Not technology, not bond-trading. Others can innovate and might even be much better than the banks in assessing risk/reward ratio. But as long as the others have to eat their losses, the banks will come out ahead.
It is not a bug there is no techie in the board. It is by design. They need diabolical monsters from the comic book super villains in the board, not techies.
Flow battery stores the energy in electrolytes in external tanks. Thus at some point we could have gas stations dispensing "charged" electrolytes making way for very rapid recharging.
As usual for any battery technology it works in the lab and the product is X+10 years away, where X is the current year.
To mitigate it browsers should present only the cookies set by a site back to that site. This might break lots of sites. It is very common for the sites to set a cookie and then load a page in another domain which reads the cookie. Many authentication schemes depend on this behavior.
Even browsers start authenticating cookie paths or maintain tables of which cookies came from which site and maintain them in different sandboxes, many big sites would not work right.
Yes, it is not encouraged much in slashdot, but still I clicked on the link provided in the summary to, gasp!, read the fine article. That site popped a banner that said, "This site is using cookies to improve your web experience!".
However, not all companies follow detailed auditing processes. The primary reason, Kaul said, is the speed at which software is being released to the marketplace. It necessitates an "agile approach," resulting in millions of lines of code being worked on and checked into production every minute. "And, right now, everyone is saying, we did not do it," Kaul said in an interview with Computerworld.
Kaul is definitely wrong here. Established mechanical engineering giants, especially from Germany, leave extensive audit trails. Come on, guys these people set up tables and recorded the names, addresses and parents of people being sent to concentration camps. Any vendor who sells software to Volkswagen knows how much testing and auditing they do before upgrading the software. Further auto companies operate on very long product cycle. Not like the web operators. It is alleged that Facebook did not even have a source code control system till after it went public!
They are an auto company. Strike one. They are German. Strike two. Even agile development has strong change management paper trials. Strike three. We can nail the engineer who checked in/merged/pulled the change.
What would be a big deal however is the code that detects whether the car is in test bench or on the road. Apparently it uses steering input and other such details. So that code block is the interesting part. Proper audit of the code changes, pull request authorizations would nail the engineer who actually did the dirty deed. But would there be code review meeting/minutes, comments fingering higher management?
This scandal will have some salutary effect in engineers who manage code, they would refuse to merge or pull such cheating code changes because it would leave their fingerprints indelibly for ever. They might even add comments in code covering their tails fingering the actual perp in the higher management.
Just like "don't use goto", or "don't use threads", etc., these guidelines and recommendations are really great to prevent beginners from making hard to spot errors, but all those variations and features exist for a reason and have a use.
Nobody uses GOTO anymore. With event driven programming and call back functions, it all spaghetti code strewn with COME FROM statements, effectively.
"Within C++ is a smaller, simpler, safer language struggling to get out." -- Bjarne Stroustrup
Very true, C++ would struggle no matter how laudable the goal is.
But he also wrote a more serious column for Car and Driver. He once talked about the decline of American motor cycle industry. Famous names like Indian Chief etc and how they all foundered. Basically they produced machines which were difficult to maintain at good condition. Every three thousand miles people had to disassemble the cylinder head and decarbonize them and reset the valves and timing etc etc. The honchos in the companies were proud their customers like to get their hands dirty, they like working on these engines. Jay Leno said, "no, we don't like messing with these engines. We want to ride and have fun. But it was impossible to get good performance without doing all these things. We were forced to do it because your engines were crappy". When Honda and Yamaha started making reliable machines that delivered good performance for long times without these messy requirements, they just ate the lunch of the old style American motorcycle manufacturers. Only Harley survived, but it was touch and go for even for them.
People like making things that work. Ages ago the only way to do it was to make your own PCB. Now a days with one day turn around, most people would like to outsource making the pcb to make sure there are no accidental contacts, no mistakenly erased and redrawn line not making full contact, making sure all the holes are drilled all the way through and there is no delamination etc. Hand made PCBs are the equivalent of your motorcycle rider decarbonizing the engine head instead of riding fast on the wide open highways of America.
The study seems to have spiked the results by offering breakfast burritos to the participants as they wait for their turn to be sampled. Further the few people who could not be detected using this method were the ones who did not partake in the free burritos. So basically this study just confirms common knowledge about people releasing bacterial clouds.