Surely you aren't trying to 'dive into the code' before the specification is complete? But hell, I've known programmers just like that...
Now you've lost all your credibility. Have you ever heard of iterative development? Waiting for a spec to be complete before diving into the code is never a good idea, and every professional in the IT industry should know that by now.
Day 1 coverage: The most successful geek party has been the "Introduction to the world wide web: become a webmaster in two hours". This party consisted in transforming a press release in RTF format, generated with Microsoft Word (how geeky!), into a standard HTML page, easily readable using a web browser!
Tech jargon contains all kinds of english words, which are often used as is, or transformed to look like native words. This is a real problem with non-techie, non-english-speakers. For example, something like this (in French), generally makes me look like an alien:
"J'ai downloadé un file manager dans le directory des tools, mais il était buggé, et il a crashé le drive".
Cool design, but I would not want to buy a new screen and a new keyboard each time I change my hardware. Also, I like to be able to change the position of my keyboard when I change my position on my chair. If it's not possible to detach the keyboard from the screen, it's not even an option for me.
Knowing why and how it happens is good, but what about healing hiccup? For most of us, hiccups are just a small annoyance for a couple of minutes, but I remember watching a medical TV emission where people explained that they suffered from chronical hiccups. These persons could have hiccups for several days (night and day), and their life was not funny at all.
About 12 percent of the queries received by the root server on Oct. 4, were for nonexistent top-level domains, such as ".elvis", ".corp", and ".localhost"
Why don't DNS servers have a list of correct top-level domains, in order to answer directly, without going to a root server?
The list is short, compared to the information the DNS server caches already, and the content of the list doesn't change so often.
This list could be downloaded once in a day or so, from the DNS root servers.
When packet filters and firewalls allow outgoing DNS queries, but block the resulting incoming responses, software on the inside of the firewall can make the same DNS queries over and over, waiting for responses that can't get through
Why the hell does a firewall accept outgoing queries to black-listed domain names, if they are configured to block the response to these queries? This seems like a serious misconception to me.
I'm a Belgian, and I have indeed voted this way. I see three major problems, still, with this way of voting: First, there have never been a vote to let the citizen decide if they wanted to vote this way. AFAIK, there have even never been a real debate in the parliament about it. This has implications. For example, old persons might be afraid of this way of doing, and refuse to do it (by just going into the cabin and go out without voting. Hopefully, the vote is mandatory in Belgium.
Second, for a lot of elections, you have to scroll to discover all the lists and/or all the candidates of a list. The lists on the first page thus probably have an advantage over the next ones.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important, since the vote is mandatory, the only ways you can refuse to vote is to vote blank or to vote null, for example by writing a message on your bulletin, or by not respecting the procedures. While voting blank is still possible with electronic voting, voting null is not possible anymore.
When I was a student, in Belgium, my network professor told us he went to Xerox PARC. His interest for networks started from there. But he also told us how dumb the managers were already. Basically, he told us, researchers had white cards for a whole lot of things, and really invented beautiful things. For example, the principle of a UI, where you could type and store a whole document and then print it later on was realized there, but a dumb manager refused the idea, claiming it was too complex: all the users want, he said, is a typewriter where you can validate your text one line, print it, and then validate the next one. No doubt that if the Xerox manegers had been smarter, Xerox would be a far bigger company than it is today.
has decided to give a exceptional bonus to the man responsible for the communication with the craft, due to a noticeable increase of his productivity;-)
OK, so this web site gives licenses for the US, in english. Are the licenses applicable outside the US? If so, wouldn't it be nice to provide the license text in other languages (at least the main ones: French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.)?
I've been involved as a developer and/or security consultant in several internet projects, and I've noticed that the main problem, most of the time, is not really technical. If you really want a secure web site, you can have one relatively easily. Of course it might not be absolutely secure, but it's very hard to break by the average hacker. The main problem is that security is often developed at the end of the project, or completely forgotten, because it doesn't add any functionality to the application. At the beginning of the project, a prototype is developed (without security, because the goal is to show the application functionality), then a first version (still without security, because you're in a hurry), then the whole thing is developed and someone sometimes starts thinking about security. Since the application hasn't been designed at the very beginning with security aspects in mind, you end up adding hacks and workarounds to the application to make it a bit more secure, but it's sometimes very hard because it might break the functional spec or make the application look different than in the demo. At the end, you often end up with a solution which uses security through obscurity: since there is no link to this administration page in the welcome page, users won't find it! BAHAHAHAHA!
I live in France, and am pretty sure it's illegal. Now, in the US, it might be a different story. The next time Americans talk me about free speech, I'll have a good laugh!
Access to email and websites is not a basic human right recognized by any government. Besides, the company owns the computer and networks you are using for your own personal interest. They have the right to know how they are used when they are responsible for them and while they are paying for them. Sorry, they own the computers and what occurs on them, not you.
This is plain stupid. They also own the phones you're using, but I doubt that allows them listening to the private conversations you might have on the phone at work.
Fact is, email is used to communicate with the outside world. If they allow you to disclose your office email address, then they implicitely accept that you receive private messages at this address. And private messages are... well, private.
BTW, some countries make it illegal for an employer to read the mails you send and receive at work. France is one of them.
the only sure-fire way to reduce the practice of private corporations bribing politicians is to limit the powers of government.
No. The best way is to do what European countries have done for quite a while now: forbid any donation from a company to a politician or party.
In Europe, this is called corruption, and is forbidden by the law.
Common, when will you FINALLY adopt standards? When you finally do, I'll go drink a pint of beer and a eat a pound of cheese at the pub, two yards from here;-)
We're using it to notify security that you MIGHT have someone in front of you that is of less than reputable character. This doesn't mean you immediately cuff him and throw him in jail, but if he tries to walk through a screener checkpoint it MIGHT be a good idea to do a little better check than a simple wand wave.
This is OK when you think about it in terms of statistics, but if you're one of these false positives and take the plane, let's say once a week, it miht become VERY annoying to have to wait for the human officer to verify your identity and so on, EACH TIME YOU TAKE THE PLANE. I would quickly ask for a "false positive certificate" if I were in this situation (or have some plastic surgery, with hope not to become another falso positive;-)).
First of all, being interested in science-fiction or reading sci-fi books doesn't mean you care about NASA, or even find it useful. This is a bit like if everybody reading books about the Middle-Ages would like to go back to these ancient days, or if every historian studying the second world and the fascist ideologies would like to kill 6 million judes. Stupid.
Second, representative democracy doesn't work like this. We elect people to represent the whole society in the parliament and in the government. Then, these people are paid to decide what is good for the people, and decide to fund programs (like NASA) thanks to the taxes everybody has to pay (according of course to their revenues). Just taxing some people based on their hobbies, habits or tastes isn't correct, and this can lead to very dangerous ideas. What if all anti-abortion people decide to refuse paying taxes because they finance public hospitals? What if all pacifists decide to refuse paying taxes because they finance the army?
I live in France, and given what just happened here, with the president of a fascist party elected for the second turn of the presidential elections, I tend to believe that we must be more and more careful of protecting the democracy.
Am I the only one to find this strange : each time a story talks about taxing cars, taxing fuel or signing the Kyoto protocol (for example) to help solving the global warming problem, a whole lot of people come in and claim that global warming doesn't exist, that it's a natural process, or that G.W. Bush is right not to do anything to solve it. Now that something comes out that might solve the problem by industrial means, everybody seems to find it cool and interesting... Let's just hope that they are slowly waking up...
I delete so many files in a day (and often several times the same file, i.e. a file that is deleted and then generated again), that I've taken the habit to always press the shift key when deleting a file. The file is thus really deleted, without going to the trash can.
I must say that I'm pretty happy about it, since I've only deleted something accidentally one or two times.
But I've always wondered why the trash is not a bit more sophisticated. For example, the trash should be organized in a directory hierarchy similar to the original one, so that you're able to find deleted files easier.
A nice thing to have would be to be able to tell the OS that files under directory X are important and must go to the trash when deleted, whether files under directory Y aren't and can be deleted directly. Same goes for file extensions.
1) That's true for BMP entity beans. If you use CMP and a decent CMP engine (look at Borland AppServer, for example), this will result in a single SQL call.
2) That's one particularity of Weblogic. ALL the other containers use optimistic concurrency, and the latest WLS (6.0) also allows it.
3) Using a decent CMP engine will save you lots of time: tuned updates, which only update the changed fields, etc. Again, look at Borland AppServer
4) The spec gives you three caching options, called commit options A, B and C. This is flexible enough in most situations.
There is no language war in Belgium. The conflicts between Walloons and Flamishes are not about the language. they could be compared with the conflicts between North-Italians and South-Italians.
Moreover, the few language problems in Belgium are most of the time caused by the Flamishes, who are even more protective than the Frenchies.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to Europe. They have job security there.
If only it was true!
Surely you aren't trying to 'dive into the code' before the specification is complete? But hell, I've known programmers just like that...
Now you've lost all your credibility. Have you ever heard of iterative development? Waiting for a spec to be complete before diving into the code is never a good idea, and every professional in the IT industry should know that by now.
Day 1 coverage:
The most successful geek party has been the "Introduction to the world wide web: become a webmaster in two hours". This party consisted in transforming a press release in RTF format, generated with Microsoft Word (how geeky!), into a standard HTML page, easily readable using a web browser!
Tech jargon contains all kinds of english words, which are often used as is, or transformed to look like native words. This is a real problem with non-techie, non-english-speakers.
For example, something like this (in French), generally makes me look like an alien:
"J'ai downloadé un file manager dans le directory des tools, mais il était buggé, et il a crashé le drive".
Cool design, but I would not want to buy a new screen and a new keyboard each time I change my hardware.
Also, I like to be able to change the position of my keyboard when I change my position on my chair. If it's not possible to detach the keyboard from the screen, it's not even an option for me.
JB.
Knowing why and how it happens is good, but what about healing hiccup?
For most of us, hiccups are just a small annoyance for a couple of minutes, but I remember watching a medical TV emission where people explained that they suffered from chronical hiccups. These persons could have hiccups for several days (night and day), and their life was not funny at all.
JB.
Why don't DNS servers have a list of correct top-level domains, in order to answer directly, without going to a root server? The list is short, compared to the information the DNS server caches already, and the content of the list doesn't change so often. This list could be downloaded once in a day or so, from the DNS root servers.
When packet filters and firewalls allow outgoing DNS queries, but block the resulting incoming responses, software on the inside of the firewall can make the same DNS queries over and over, waiting for responses that can't get through
Why the hell does a firewall accept outgoing queries to black-listed domain names, if they are configured to block the response to these queries? This seems like a serious misconception to me.
JB.
I'm a Belgian, and I have indeed voted this way.
I see three major problems, still, with this way of voting:
First, there have never been a vote to let the citizen decide if they wanted to vote this way. AFAIK, there have even never been a real debate in the parliament about it. This has implications. For example, old persons might be afraid of this way of doing, and refuse to do it (by just going into the cabin and go out without voting. Hopefully, the vote is mandatory in Belgium.
Second, for a lot of elections, you have to scroll to discover all the lists and/or all the candidates of a list. The lists on the first page thus probably have an advantage over the next ones.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important, since the vote is mandatory, the only ways you can refuse to vote is to vote blank or to vote null, for example by writing a message on your bulletin, or by not respecting the procedures. While voting blank is still possible with electronic voting, voting null is not possible anymore.
JB.
When I was a student, in Belgium, my network professor told us he went to Xerox PARC.
His interest for networks started from there.
But he also told us how dumb the managers were already. Basically, he told us, researchers had white cards for a whole lot of things, and really invented beautiful things.
For example, the principle of a UI, where you could type and store a whole document and then print it later on was realized there, but a dumb manager refused the idea, claiming it was too complex: all the users want, he said, is a typewriter where you can validate your text one line, print it, and then validate the next one.
No doubt that if the Xerox manegers had been smarter, Xerox would be a far bigger company than it is today.
JB.
JB.
has decided to give a exceptional bonus to the man responsible for the communication with the craft, due to a noticeable increase of his productivity ;-)
OK, so this web site gives licenses for the US, in english.
Are the licenses applicable outside the US?
If so, wouldn't it be nice to provide the license text in other languages (at least the main ones: French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.)?
JB.
I've been involved as a developer and/or security consultant in several internet projects, and I've noticed that the main problem, most of the time, is not really technical. If you really want a secure web site, you can have one relatively easily. Of course it might not be absolutely secure, but it's very hard to break by the average hacker.
The main problem is that security is often developed at the end of the project, or completely forgotten, because it doesn't add any functionality to the application.
At the beginning of the project, a prototype is developed (without security, because the goal is to show the application functionality), then a first version (still without security, because you're in a hurry), then the whole thing is developed and someone sometimes starts thinking about security.
Since the application hasn't been designed at the very beginning with security aspects in mind, you end up adding hacks and workarounds to the application to make it a bit more secure, but it's sometimes very hard because it might break the functional spec or make the application look different than in the demo.
At the end, you often end up with a solution which uses security through obscurity: since there is no link to this administration page in the welcome page, users won't find it! BAHAHAHAHA!
JB.
I live in France, and am pretty sure it's illegal. Now, in the US, it might be a different story. The next time Americans talk me about free speech, I'll have a good laugh!
This is plain stupid. They also own the phones you're using, but I doubt that allows them listening to the private conversations you might have on the phone at work.
Fact is, email is used to communicate with the outside world. If they allow you to disclose your office email address, then they implicitely accept that you receive private messages at this address. And private messages are ... well, private.
BTW, some countries make it illegal for an employer to read the mails you send and receive at work. France is one of them.
JB
No. The best way is to do what European countries have done for quite a while now: forbid any donation from a company to a politician or party.
In Europe, this is called corruption, and is forbidden by the law.
It reminds me the old Dilbert joke:
Computer : "Enter your password!"
Dilbert : "Penis"
Computer : "Sorry, your password is not long enough."
JB.
Common, when will you FINALLY adopt standards? ;-)
When you finally do, I'll go drink a pint of beer and a eat a pound of cheese at the pub, two yards from here
JB
We're using it to notify security that you MIGHT have someone in front of you that is of less than reputable character. This doesn't mean you immediately cuff him and throw him in jail, but if he tries to walk through a screener checkpoint it MIGHT be a good idea to do a little better check than a simple wand wave.
This is OK when you think about it in terms of statistics, but if you're one of these false positives and take the plane, let's say once a week, it miht become VERY annoying to have to wait for the human officer to verify your identity and so on, EACH TIME YOU TAKE THE PLANE. I would quickly ask for a "false positive certificate" if I were in this situation (or have some plastic surgery, with hope not to become another falso positive
JB.
First of all, being interested in science-fiction or reading sci-fi books doesn't mean you care about NASA, or even find it useful. This is a bit like if everybody reading books about the Middle-Ages would like to go back to these ancient days, or if every historian studying the second world and the fascist ideologies would like to kill 6 million judes. Stupid.
Second, representative democracy doesn't work like this. We elect people to represent the whole society in the parliament and in the government. Then, these people are paid to decide what is good for the people, and decide to fund programs (like NASA) thanks to the taxes everybody has to pay (according of course to their revenues). Just taxing some people based on their hobbies, habits or tastes isn't correct, and this can lead to very dangerous ideas. What if all anti-abortion people decide to refuse paying taxes because they finance public hospitals? What if all pacifists decide to refuse paying taxes because they finance the army?
I live in France, and given what just happened here, with the president of a fascist party elected for the second turn of the presidential elections, I tend to believe that we must be more and more careful of protecting the democracy.
Just my two eurocents.
Am I the only one to find this strange : each time a story talks about taxing cars, taxing fuel or signing the Kyoto protocol (for example) to help solving the global warming problem, a whole lot of people come in and claim that global warming doesn't exist, that it's a natural process, or that G.W. Bush is right not to do anything to solve it. Now that something comes out that might solve the problem by industrial means, everybody seems to find it cool and interesting...
Let's just hope that they are slowly waking up...
JB.
OK, so with this box, you can record a TV program on your hard drive, do whatever you want with the program, and send it to friends over the internet.
How's this different from TV cards plugged into your PC? And if there is no difference, why don't ABC, CBS and NBC sue the TV cards manufacturers?
Perhaps they already did and these cards don't exist in the US, but here in Europe, they're perfectly legal...
This weekend, a movie theater and video store opened up again in Kabul (renting Independence Day)
;-)
Independence Day! Rhaaaa! Please Taliban, come back
I delete so many files in a day (and often several times the same file, i.e. a file that is deleted and then generated again), that I've taken the habit to always press the shift key when deleting a file. The file is thus really deleted, without going to the trash can.
;-)
I must say that I'm pretty happy about it, since I've only deleted something accidentally one or two times.
But I've always wondered why the trash is not a bit more sophisticated. For example, the trash should be organized in a directory hierarchy similar to the original one, so that you're able to find deleted files easier.
A nice thing to have would be to be able to tell the OS that files under directory X are important and must go to the trash when deleted, whether files under directory Y aren't and can be deleted directly. Same goes for file extensions.
Damn, I should patent this idea
1) That's true for BMP entity beans. If you use CMP and a decent CMP engine (look at Borland AppServer, for example), this will result in a single SQL call.
2) That's one particularity of Weblogic. ALL the other containers use optimistic concurrency, and the latest WLS (6.0) also allows it.
3) Using a decent CMP engine will save you lots of time: tuned updates, which only update the changed fields, etc. Again, look at Borland AppServer
4) The spec gives you three caching options, called commit options A, B and C. This is flexible enough in most situations.
There is no language war in Belgium. The conflicts between Walloons and Flamishes are not about the language. they could be compared with the conflicts between North-Italians and South-Italians.
Moreover, the few language problems in Belgium are most of the time caused by the Flamishes, who are even more protective than the Frenchies.