Congratulations! You have just caught up with the top ciphers of the 16th century.
This is called "steaganography" -- I think that's spelled correctly, it's too much for my local spellcheck -- and the version you suggest was also suggested by Francis Bacon.
For a really good time, imagine twiddling the least-significant bit of a big GIF file: use a 1024x768 wallpaper, and you can encode about 100K bytes of text. Compression helps: the more compressed it is, the more it looks like statistical noise ("white").
At least for me, the problem went away as soon as I learned to discipline myself to no rest my wrists on the keyboard; keep your hands up and flat and you shouldn't have any troubles.
Most likely with the laptop you're holding it in a position that takes the compression off your wrists.
Yeah, that's what I bill for regular programming, on contract, 1099. Assuming 2000 hr/year that $120K gross; figure that you pay about 30 percent of that for benefits and 8 percent for the employer's share of FICA, and we get something like $72K. Makes sense.
I don't agree. BASIC games for home weren't around until I'd been programming for ten years anyway, but I still learned things from typing in other's code -- and still do, for that matter, especially in a new language. At the very least, you become more skilled at the essential task of figuring out why the damn thing won't compile oh there's no comma there!
If you're typing them in with interest in what's happening, you have to concentrate on the source for minutes or hours, depending on how good a typist you are. I seriously think that helps understand the program, and by extension programming.
As one of the people who helped write the navy's book on evaluation, I'm afraid I have to tell you you're wrong. Going back to the old Orange Book (TCSEC), there are certain applications that require certification at particular levels.
Besides, this comment doesn't even make any real sense -- you can be evaluated at EAL 1, which is merely functional testing and offers no assurance at all.
If I ever visit a site that succeeds in doing that to me, I'll never visit that site again, and I'll email them and post to the abuse groups saying so.
Another vote for Merrell. I've got several pair of Merrell slip ons for travel; then don't beep, and if you have to take them off anyway they come off easily but go right back on. But they're still comfortable for a full day presentation, which is (believe it or not) worse than walking all day.
Re:Why extra inches *really* matter :-)
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
Would that I believed it.
Seriously, I'd love to have someone buy me a 20 inch iMac, or better yet a G5 with a 20-in screen. If you know of good solid research that suggests it really is better, I'd love to see it, but it's one of the things that in general has been submerged in individual variation in the experiments I know about.
But I still want one.
IT doesn't matter -- but not being a moron matters
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Like most of these things, the answer to the question is not "yes" or "no". Having the best new technology doesn't matter: lots of companies are still running happily on one variant or another of the IBM 360 architecture.
What does matter is that some business models that work don't work unless you have the right (new, or new-ish) technology: you can't have an Amazon.com without advanced web systems, or you can't have it feasibly and cost-effectively.
On the other hand, having a new 20-inch iMac on every desktop doesn't much matter. (Drat.)
The trick with IT -- and about everything else in business -- is to really figure out what does matter to the business, and to work your ass off optimizing that thing that matters.
One thing to note is that the C++ version of the compiler came in at 4500 lines, while the XL equivalent came in at some 2700 lines. This seems to imply that XL may be easier to work in than C/C++.
That's just silly. An APL version of it might be only 20 lines long, but it wouldn't be easier to work with because of that.
Yes, exactly. There is some redundancy in the way we code, but the complexity is not just in that redundancy. There are some hints of the intractability of reducing complexity in Greg Chaitin's algorithmic information theory.
Simonyi has a good point. Don't let Hungarian notation bother you -- it's a kludge on top of an essentially untyped unprotected language (C) trying to get back some of the protections offered by strong typing, and while Hungarian notation is a horrible solution, so are all the others.
But the problem is that while keeping clarity is a great idea, it's proven immensely hard to do. Fred Brooks (viz., the No Silver Bullet paper) argues that this is because the problems we're solving with software are intrinsically complex; there's no way to reduce the complexity below a certain point. On the other hand, anyone who writes real code knows that they spend a hell of a lot of their time writing the equivalent of a for loop over index i again and again and again. There's some unnecessary redundancy there.
But saying that you want less complexity is a lot different from saying you know how to get rid of the complexity.
This may be a strange question -- my questions often are -- but why change just because the OS/X default changed? It's easy enough to change it back: I suspect there's a version of chsh(1), but even if there isn't, it's just the last parameter in/etc/passwd.
You say they're selling "security insurance"? That may be your line of attack.
If it's "insurance" then there probably has to be an underwriter. (If they're doing it on a wholly self-insured basis, they probably still have regulatory issues to deal with. Of course, IANAL, YMMV, warranty limited to the cost of electrons used.)
Now, the way insurance works is that someone computes the risk, defined by the equation
R = P H
where R is the risk, P is the probability of the undesirable event, and H is the hazard, or cost of the undesirable event. The idea is that the risk is how much money you have to put away to account for the times you have to pay the penalty -- and insurers then charge M R (M > 1) as a premium. (As a rule of thumb, M is about 2; this means they make some margin and have some room for a run of bad luck.)
Now, what you're saying is that P is much higher than you think they imagine... so you might want to quietly contact the underwriters and suggest they aren't charging enough to protect themselves from claims.
First off, you don't tell us a lot about your business. Do you have well-stated service level agreements? If not, get the hell off slashdot and do SLAs... you've got noplace to stand without them.
Second, once you know what your service level committments really are, ask yourself "do I have half a clue what the fuck I'm doing?" If the honest answer is "no", do what has been suggested and move your services off to a hosted-service firm. (I have heard good things about Rackspace but there are a bunh of these firms around.) Even if the honest answer is "yes", you should seriously consider a hosting firm, because a lot of the things you need to do have a big fixed cost up front; you get better payoff by buying a part of the up-front costs someone else alerady paid.
Third, one topic you've left off the list is disaster recover -- what they now call "business continuity planning" on the grounds that "disaster" sounds so scary. You need to make sure that you have (1) off-site backups sufficiently far offsite to be pretty certain that a local disaster won't compromise them. (I had several clients and acquaintances who were knocked off the air on 9/11/01. Some of them had backups outside Manhattan, and they got working again quickly. Some of them didn't, and some of those firms are gone now.) You also need (2) to know where you're going to go with those backups if the disaster comes. A number of firms will let you pay them a small fee that guarantees access to backup servers; the other end of the spectrum is to have a secondary site that's geographically well separated, eg, New York City and Princeton, NJ or southern Connecticut for Wall Street firms, or San Francisco and Salt Lake City for the west coast. Once you've set this up, test it. Cut over to the backup every so often.
How do you know what level of this stuff you need? That's why you need a well-stated SLA.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations! You have just caught up with the top ciphers of the 16th century.
This is called "steaganography" -- I think that's spelled correctly, it's too much for my local spellcheck -- and the version you suggest was also suggested by Francis Bacon.
For a really good time, imagine twiddling the least-significant bit of a big GIF file: use a 1024x768 wallpaper, and you can encode about 100K bytes of text. Compression helps: the more compressed it is, the more it looks like statistical noise ("white").
At least for me, the problem went away as soon as I learned to discipline myself to no rest my wrists on the keyboard; keep your hands up and flat and you shouldn't have any troubles.
Most likely with the laptop you're holding it in a position that takes the compression off your wrists.
Yeah, that's what I bill for regular programming, on contract, 1099. Assuming 2000 hr/year that $120K gross; figure that you pay about 30 percent of that for benefits and 8 percent for the employer's share of FICA, and we get something like $72K. Makes sense.
I don't agree. BASIC games for home weren't around until I'd been programming for ten years anyway, but I still learned things from typing in other's code -- and still do, for that matter, especially in a new language. At the very least, you become more skilled at the essential task of figuring out why the damn thing won't compile oh there's no comma there!
If you're typing them in with interest in what's happening, you have to concentrate on the source for minutes or hours, depending on how good a typist you are. I seriously think that helps understand the program, and by extension programming.
As one of the people who helped write the navy's book on evaluation, I'm afraid I have to tell you you're wrong. Going back to the old Orange Book (TCSEC), there are certain applications that require certification at particular levels.
Besides, this comment doesn't even make any real sense -- you can be evaluated at EAL 1, which is merely functional testing and offers no assurance at all.
If I ever visit a site that succeeds in doing that to me, I'll never visit that site again, and I'll email them and post to the abuse groups saying so.
Another vote for Merrell. I've got several pair of Merrell slip ons for travel; then don't beep, and if you have to take them off anyway they come off easily but go right back on. But they're still comfortable for a full day presentation, which is (believe it or not) worse than walking all day.
See, that's the problem with my sense of humor -- I not only don't catch other people's jokes, they don't catch mine.
(And when does KM *not* look extremely hot?)
Oh. Okay.
What's "street fighter"?
Uh, those links are broken.
God knows the words "lightweight" and "Gnu" don't generally go together, but how about Guile?
Congratulations. You've just discovered that Canada has a parlimentary system.
Hell, Martha Stewart is in a heapa trouble for stock price manipulation: she said "I'm innocent". I think SCO may have actually hurt themselves here.
Augh. Guys, back in the day, bps DID equal baud. Multilevel encodings is why this stopped being true.
Jeeez, this *is* a thread about myths, right?
... is the limit for a voice grade phone line.
Would that I believed it.
Seriously, I'd love to have someone buy me a 20 inch iMac, or better yet a G5 with a 20-in screen. If you know of good solid research that suggests it really is better, I'd love to see it, but it's one of the things that in general has been submerged in individual variation in the experiments I know about.
But I still want one.
Like most of these things, the answer to the question is not "yes" or "no". Having the best new technology doesn't matter: lots of companies are still running happily on one variant or another of the IBM 360 architecture.
What does matter is that some business models that work don't work unless you have the right (new, or new-ish) technology: you can't have an Amazon.com without advanced web systems, or you can't have it feasibly and cost-effectively.
On the other hand, having a new 20-inch iMac on every desktop doesn't much matter. (Drat.)
The trick with IT -- and about everything else in business -- is to really figure out what does matter to the business, and to work your ass off optimizing that thing that matters.
How did it taste?
Since when has any normal language looked anything like APL? Nor -- even though I used to really like writing APL -- would I suggest it should.
XL looks like a fairly nice language, frankly, but just being more concise isn't a recommendation.
That's just silly. An APL version of it might be only 20 lines long, but it wouldn't be easier to work with because of that.
Yes, exactly. There is some redundancy in the way we code, but the complexity is not just in that redundancy. There are some hints of the intractability of reducing complexity in Greg Chaitin's algorithmic information theory.
Simonyi has a good point. Don't let Hungarian notation bother you -- it's a kludge on top of an essentially untyped unprotected language (C) trying to get back some of the protections offered by strong typing, and while Hungarian notation is a horrible solution, so are all the others.
But the problem is that while keeping clarity is a great idea, it's proven immensely hard to do. Fred Brooks (viz., the No Silver Bullet paper) argues that this is because the problems we're solving with software are intrinsically complex; there's no way to reduce the complexity below a certain point. On the other hand, anyone who writes real code knows that they spend a hell of a lot of their time writing the equivalent of a for loop over index i again and again and again. There's some unnecessary redundancy there.
But saying that you want less complexity is a lot different from saying you know how to get rid of the complexity.
This may be a strange question -- my questions often are -- but why change just because the OS/X default changed? It's easy enough to change it back: I suspect there's a version of chsh(1), but even if there isn't, it's just the last parameter in /etc/passwd.
Now, the way insurance works is that someone computes the risk, defined by the equation
where R is the risk, P is the probability of the undesirable event, and H is the hazard, or cost of the undesirable event. The idea is that the risk is how much money you have to put away to account for the times you have to pay the penalty -- and insurers then charge M R (M > 1) as a premium. (As a rule of thumb, M is about 2; this means they make some margin and have some room for a run of bad luck.) Now, what you're saying is that P is much higher than you think they imagine... but there are some other things to be said.
... you've got noplace to stand without them.
First off, you don't tell us a lot about your business. Do you have well-stated service level agreements? If not, get the hell off slashdot and do SLAs
Second, once you know what your service level committments really are, ask yourself "do I have half a clue what the fuck I'm doing?" If the honest answer is "no", do what has been suggested and move your services off to a hosted-service firm. (I have heard good things about Rackspace but there are a bunh of these firms around.) Even if the honest answer is "yes", you should seriously consider a hosting firm, because a lot of the things you need to do have a big fixed cost up front; you get better payoff by buying a part of the up-front costs someone else alerady paid.
Third, one topic you've left off the list is disaster recover -- what they now call "business continuity planning" on the grounds that "disaster" sounds so scary. You need to make sure that you have (1) off-site backups sufficiently far offsite to be pretty certain that a local disaster won't compromise them. (I had several clients and acquaintances who were knocked off the air on 9/11/01. Some of them had backups outside Manhattan, and they got working again quickly. Some of them didn't, and some of those firms are gone now.) You also need (2) to know where you're going to go with those backups if the disaster comes. A number of firms will let you pay them a small fee that guarantees access to backup servers; the other end of the spectrum is to have a secondary site that's geographically well separated, eg, New York City and Princeton, NJ or southern Connecticut for Wall Street firms, or San Francisco and Salt Lake City for the west coast. Once you've set this up, test it. Cut over to the backup every so often.
How do you know what level of this stuff you need? That's why you need a well-stated SLA.