If you want to clone frequently, cough up the $28 for SuperDuper. It has a 'smart update' feature that only copies changed files after the initial clone, so subsequent clone jobs finish much more quickly. You can also schedule jobs with the paid version.
The curent version of Carbon Copy Cloner has this feature, too.
rsync does that, too. Plus it's open source and has a nice, easy-to-automate command line interface. You can even use it to securely backup to another machine over the network (via ssh).
It ought to be possible ( using PGP ) to have the vote counters return to you a code that is your vote encrypted. Only you can decrypt it. If it is not correct, you can go public.
No, that's not good enough—even you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a certain way unless the ballot itself is checked. Otherwise the person to whom you sold your vote/who bullied your vote out of you can just ask for your encrypted vote code.
Well, if you're the type that can think of putting access to/etc/passwd into, say, an object that's destroyed just before dropping root, then you can probably think of a way to prevent yourself from calling dangling pointers too. And if you unit test properly, and avoid side-effects, you'll save a whole lot of trouble when you go to integrate, too.
It's just people being lazy, hurried, or in some unfortunate cases, stupid.
Yes, which is why your architects and best developers create a platform on which the rest of your developers can relatively easily instantiate individual solutions. There's more than one programmer working on any sizeable project.
That's like choosing to live in a mental asylum instead of a normal home. Yeah, those padded walls are really safe, but man, anyone who exercises a little caution doesn't need that kind of thing.
More like living in a gated community rather than living in the projects (the ghetto). The gated community may cost more, but it's safer than the projects, where you have to be careful not to get shot—though rather insular and not as safe as the people who live there generally think.
Unfortunately, that solution breaks down when you have multiple different pointer variables pointing to the same location. This will happen in any graph-like data structure more advanced than a tree. You can get around it by adding a level of indirection from handles to pointers, and making the handle-pointer mapping nodes reference counted (note that reference count cycles are not possible using this strategy), but that can have a significant performance hit, and requires quite a bit of refactoring.
Garbage collected languages is no solution to poor programming. If you can't remember to not call a function pointer that you just freed, you'll probably forget to close/etc/passwd before dropping privs, or something equally stupid.
And you could encode that kind of stuff in accessors which follow security policies, rather than directly hard coding the access and the policy every time. For example, this is why we separate code into separate processes owned by different users rather than throwing everything in the kernel. It's not an all-or-nothing thing: the more bugs you can prevent, the better. Even people who know what they're doing make mistakes from time to time. One of the biggest sources of mistakes is when you combine two different pieces of code that seemed to work correctly on their own, but don't quite realize some of the undocumented subtlties in their behaviors, and thus the two interfere and cause an error.
I dunno. I manage to write C++ and never overflow a buffer, always release all resources when I'm done with them, and never throw away an error. Why can't the other 95% of the programmers out there do the same thing?
Because they don't care or they're too busy with other stuff, and even if that's not the case, sometimes people make mistakes. That's why you write tools to check that programs are actually being written correctly (wherever possible) and to make it as easy as possible to create full coverage tests, rather than relying on other programmers to do the right thing. Automation, it's a great thing.
For what it's worth, my main personal pet peave about where we've gone is static type checking. It's certainly interesting, but the notion that all of CS seems to have focused so intensely on it, sometimes starving dynamic languages of attention seems to me an artifact of the order in which history occurred.
I don't think the historical precedent is that clear. While Russell's type theory and Church's simply typed lambda calculus both predate the development of programming languages, they were both developed as successors to less-structured untyped mathematical languages, to be more amenable to reasoning. The reason static typing has taken such a central role is that it serves as a simpler basis for the execution model of real computers than dynamic typing. Static typing allows you to ensure you're working with total operations on data, whereas dynamic typing requires a more complex execution model tolerant of errors and partiality. While you could push that checking into the hardware (like a Lisp machine), that still makes a more complicated basis for computing than a statically checked assemblage of total operations. In fact, combinational logic circuits are in a sense statically typed, simply with a very weak type system (input and output bus width). On the other hand, it's natural and straightforward to build a higher level dynamically typed system on top of a (properly designed) statically typed system. There is no lack of attention to dynamically typed languages in practice, they are simply more appropriate for higher-level non-critical applications.
How can you prove something is secure if you can't see the source code?
Actually, you can verify that a piece of compiled code is secure if the vendor provides type annotations with it in the style of proof-carrying code. This is similar to how the JVM can verify that Java bytecode won't do things it's not supposed to, except now we need a richer specification of what we consider to be secure.
From TFA:
The SDR Forum has cited the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), a widely used technique for securing e-commerce transactions, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s public hash algorithms as evidence that open processes often yield the most highly successful security techniques.
Very typical. First, they say that the stuff is not as secure as the "security by obscurity" method, then they go and say the most widely accepted and used method for secure web transactions is evidence that open source software yields the most highly successful security technique.
And we keep voting the same crew into office who keep appointing the same bozos to the FCC... shame on us.
These are two different groups. The FCC is advocating security through obscurity, while the the SDR Forum is advocating open source. Get it?
Microsoft already has world-class research facilities. This expansion is a development center, not part of MSR. H-1B does not mandate paying exactly the average wage, the idea is to only bring in people who you would pay as well as your average American competing for the same job. Check this out, Microsoft has filed H-1B requests for researchers to be paid $110k/year. This is not the common definition of slave labor: 2005 Microsoft H-1B requests
By the way, a couple of reasons that there are so few American grad students in engineering and the sciences are (a) the ballooning costs of student loans, often with interest accruing while in school; and (b) the image (often perpetuated by Slashdot) that engineering and science are dead end roads that get no respect.
a) Nobody pays for a PhD in science or engineering with student loans. If you get in and they don't find a way to cover your costs and living expenses with assistantships and fellowships and tuition waivers, you didn't really get in.
I know. I was referring to undergrad student loans (for U.S. undergrads). Most of them today accrue interest even while students are still in school.
b) I have a PhD in physics and get no shortage of respect from people who don't. I spend most of my time around other people with PhDs, so it's weird when people act like it's a big deal. If I had to do it again, I'd do neuroscience though.
Some people act respectful but actually despise people with academic degrees. It's all pretty messed up.
A LOT of funding is restricted to US citizens only - funding from the armed forces, for example (I'm in physics) and a lot of donated scholarships are US citizen only. True, assistantships tend to be evenly distributed, but all the really cool stuff is US citizen only. Sometimes it feels like if you're an american and can count past 7 you'll get a scholarship, but if you're foreign you need to win a nobel first...
Wow, perhaps it's different in Physics vs. CS, because I really don't see that situation in CS. We have plenty of international students on DARPA and ONR funding, and it's never been much more of a problem than for U.S. citizens (DARPA got really applied and micromanaging on us with the Bush II administration).
Minimum wage? Are you freakin' serious? There's no such thing as minimum wage for researchers. In the industry, they're almost always very highly paid. Usually, that starts with 6 digits. And it doesn't change much if you go to Canada (in fact, the actual cost per employee might be even higher).
You're exaggerating. First of all, there really aren't that many true research positions in industry, and secondly, those that are there aren't "very highly paid," they're mediocre, at best. Upper 5 digits to lower 6 digits, that's it. Smart fuckers who want the money are leaving research to go to hedge funds and the like, where mid 6 digits is common, 7 digits if you're good, 10 digits if you're absolutely wicked. Of course you have to have a special place in your heart for boring as hell and heartburn gourmet.
Just to be clear: that is doctoral studies (not a Masters), and while it's a full-time job it is time-limited (in practice to five years) and it's not very well paid compared to the kind of jobs many recent graduates can get if they go into the industry instead of doing a PhD.
I think it makes sense. Doctoral students are doing a job after all, with teaching, administration and a lot of the grunt work on some research project (and as they get closer to finishing, of course, more "real" research).
Oh, no kidding, I dig what you're sayin'. I was referring to doctoral studies, as well (although over here, Ph.D. == everybody thinks you're an idiot, so some people tend to leave it off their CV/resume). Five years does sound pretty quick for a Ph.D, though. Maybe the benefits help folks concentrate?
It all varies from country to country of course. In Sweden, for example, university enrollment is free. You still take student loans, but only for paying for room and board, and half the money isn't a loan, but a grant. Doctoral studies is a job; you get a salary, with pension benefits, vacation time and all.
Wow man, that's awesome. We here in the U.S. don't get pension benefits, and instead of vacation time, we're just not allowed to be employed by the university for more than 11 months out of the year (so we're not classed as fulltime). Plus you got the hot Swedish babes. Too bad I don't speak Swedish (yet..!).
This may be the case at MIT, but at your average school thats not in the top 25 for whatever field we are talking about (which is where most professors go, right?) I doubt that this is the case. I admit that this opinion is based on my experiences as an undergraduate and a lot of secondhand knowledge from what people who did take this route tell me. I do believe that unless you are in that small group that is absolutely driven to teach at one of the top schools in the nation and be nationally recognized, it can be pretty easy. 90% of Phds are not in that top 10% that you seem to be referring to.
Ok, maybe, but people aren't competing that hotly for the crappy schools; the competition is for MIT and the like. If you look at the sizes of engineering departments, they're actually weighted towards the top departments. You might have a top-5 department with 100 profs and a rank 50 department with 10 profs. Similarly, top departments tend to have more Ph.D. students than sucky departments, because the top departments are able to get the research grants to pay the students; and if you get into a good program, you're going to be ensconced in that particular culture. Moreover, due to demand, MIT and the like generally pays LESS than some random lower-tier school. And profs generally don't go to such an institution to teach. They go there to conduct research and supervise grad students, with a little teaching thrown in as necessary. Ph.D's as a whole are already pretty high up on the scale in terms of either intelligence or hard work; oftentimes both. So if you look at the entire population, it's not as ridiculous a claim to say that 90% of Ph.D's fall in the top 10% in these regards.
Experiences as an undergrad tells you very little about what a professor actually does. Usually you have one of three scenarios in a class: an untenured lecturer, making $30-40k/year; a great professor who's either old or totally stressed out and might not get tenure; or a total blowoff professor who's actually really hard at work on other stuff (grants, research, etc.), but doesn't actually give a damn about undergrads.
I, for one, much prefer being a software developer to being a professor: easier job, more room for advancement into management, and fewer annoying kids (and you can get them fired if they're bad enough).
More scholarships and assistantships are restricted to American citizens than are open to international students. They may not have undergraduate student loans, but they're also usually working against a massive differential in home currency:dollar conversion. For many of them, even the flight to the US is a huge expense.
That's very true about the flight—bootstrapping costs. But once you're here and have been here for a couple of months, you're at a net positive compared to students who did their undergrad in the U.S. and have student loans. That's because the vast majority of graduate students in engineering do not pay for their education; they are paid modest monthly stipends. Speaking of which, I've never heard of any research assistantships or teaching assistantships at my institution that are restricted to U.S. citizens. A few fellowships, sure, but not even most of those. Probably the closest thing is that teaching assistant positions require a test of English language proficiency, but they've even gotten around that with "non contact" TAs. I guess that I'm just saying that IF you can get into a good school/department, the inequities for foreign students are about as low as they feasibly could be given reality, and the incentives are much higher, compared to domestic students (due to both social and monetary reasons).
Sure, but even the D in R&D isn't usually done by Joe Programmer (not that the occasional Joe Programmer doesn't do it - just that the profiles of folks doing such work usually tends to have a graduate degree or two listed).
If you're talking Microsoft software development, yes it is. There are plenty of kids with newly-minted bachelors degrees working on Windows, SQL Server, and dev tools, not to mention the lower-profile products. I know plenty of the little hellspawn.
While I understand the cost of student loans for undergrad degrees, you often get assistantships for going to graduate school - I went to grad school entirely on a GRA and didn't have to pay a penny. And some student loans in fact charge you lesser interest rates until after you start working.
In most urban areas, assistantships aren't enough to more than get by today. If you're on a rural campus and have no family to support, but you can probably save or pay off loans with half of it, but that's a lot slower way to pay off loans than if you had a regular job. While some student loans may charge lower interest rates while in school, the aggregate phenomenon is that the average load of student loans has steadily increased in recent years, as has the composite rate of interest accural while in school (across all loans a student has). When I was an undergrad, I didn't even think about paying for school; this made it a lot easier to fall into grad school. Nowadays, most students are up on some pretty hefty loans.
But I do agree with your second point - graduate school and technical degrees are looked down upon in the US for some reason. Ah, well.
That's absolutely ridiculous. International students can afford these things but not American students?
Correct. That's because International students have much lower, if any student loans to pay off, since they typically did their undergrad in their home country, and are some of the best students from their country. Domestic and International students typically do not pay much if anything for postgraduate education in engineering (other than their time).
The salaries may be the same but everything else isnt. Software engineers in the real world work extremely hard, I dont know of any who ever do less than 40 hours a week. Working as a professor in academia you get extremely flexible hours that are typically lower than that of a programmer, a crapton of time off, great job security, pensions, etc. Overall I would say that professors have it pretty good, you cant just look at salaries straight up, in terms of lifestyle they win. There is a reason that people compete for these jobs tooth and nail whereas companies have to compete for programmers to work for them.
I'm sorry, but you don't know what they hell you're talking about. Professors at good research institutions have it extremely hard. Lower hours? A crapton of time off? Not if you want to get tenure, you don't. You usually have to teach at least one class a semester (which can suck away your whole semester if you want to do the class RIGHT), and that's not even their main job, it's really just an extra annoyance thrown in on the side. Their main job is attracting grant money and conducting and supervising research. It is common for assistant professors to work nights and weekends, probably moreso than a software dev. Very common. And if you don't do that, you won't make tenure, and you'll be asked to leave the department. Then, by the time you do get tenure, you're involved in all sorts of conference program committees, invited lectures, and campus governance. It's not at all uncommon to be away from the office on business travel for weeks on end—except unlike an executive at a software company, the pay is still poor. People aren't competing for for academic jobs because they're easy, they're competing for them because of the prestige and perceived freedom.
Dude, calm down. Not all of us even want to work at Microsoft. I for one know it would be trivial for me to get a job at Microsoft or Google (I've had to turn down a few offers), but I prefer to keep working at my convenience store because I ENJOY IT! Now a gourmet ice cream store? I might go for that.
Slashdot Mirror
premier != premiere
No, that's not good enough—even you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a certain way unless the ballot itself is checked. Otherwise the person to whom you sold your vote/who bullied your vote out of you can just ask for your encrypted vote code.
Yes, which is why your architects and best developers create a platform on which the rest of your developers can relatively easily instantiate individual solutions. There's more than one programmer working on any sizeable project.
More like living in a gated community rather than living in the projects (the ghetto). The gated community may cost more, but it's safer than the projects, where you have to be careful not to get shot—though rather insular and not as safe as the people who live there generally think.
Unfortunately, that solution breaks down when you have multiple different pointer variables pointing to the same location. This will happen in any graph-like data structure more advanced than a tree. You can get around it by adding a level of indirection from handles to pointers, and making the handle-pointer mapping nodes reference counted (note that reference count cycles are not possible using this strategy), but that can have a significant performance hit, and requires quite a bit of refactoring.
And you could encode that kind of stuff in accessors which follow security policies, rather than directly hard coding the access and the policy every time. For example, this is why we separate code into separate processes owned by different users rather than throwing everything in the kernel. It's not an all-or-nothing thing: the more bugs you can prevent, the better. Even people who know what they're doing make mistakes from time to time. One of the biggest sources of mistakes is when you combine two different pieces of code that seemed to work correctly on their own, but don't quite realize some of the undocumented subtlties in their behaviors, and thus the two interfere and cause an error.
Because they don't care or they're too busy with other stuff, and even if that's not the case, sometimes people make mistakes. That's why you write tools to check that programs are actually being written correctly (wherever possible) and to make it as easy as possible to create full coverage tests, rather than relying on other programmers to do the right thing. Automation, it's a great thing.
I don't think the historical precedent is that clear. While Russell's type theory and Church's simply typed lambda calculus both predate the development of programming languages, they were both developed as successors to less-structured untyped mathematical languages, to be more amenable to reasoning. The reason static typing has taken such a central role is that it serves as a simpler basis for the execution model of real computers than dynamic typing. Static typing allows you to ensure you're working with total operations on data, whereas dynamic typing requires a more complex execution model tolerant of errors and partiality. While you could push that checking into the hardware (like a Lisp machine), that still makes a more complicated basis for computing than a statically checked assemblage of total operations. In fact, combinational logic circuits are in a sense statically typed, simply with a very weak type system (input and output bus width). On the other hand, it's natural and straightforward to build a higher level dynamically typed system on top of a (properly designed) statically typed system. There is no lack of attention to dynamically typed languages in practice, they are simply more appropriate for higher-level non-critical applications.
You're right. The comment to which you replied is simply incorrect.
Actually, you can verify that a piece of compiled code is secure if the vendor provides type annotations with it in the style of proof-carrying code. This is similar to how the JVM can verify that Java bytecode won't do things it's not supposed to, except now we need a richer specification of what we consider to be secure.
Very typical. First, they say that the stuff is not as secure as the "security by obscurity" method, then they go and say the most widely accepted and used method for secure web transactions is evidence that open source software yields the most highly successful security technique.
And we keep voting the same crew into office who keep appointing the same bozos to the FCC... shame on us.
These are two different groups. The FCC is advocating security through obscurity, while the the SDR Forum is advocating open source. Get it?
Microsoft already has world-class research facilities. This expansion is a development center, not part of MSR. H-1B does not mandate paying exactly the average wage, the idea is to only bring in people who you would pay as well as your average American competing for the same job. Check this out, Microsoft has filed H-1B requests for researchers to be paid $110k/year. This is not the common definition of slave labor: 2005 Microsoft H-1B requests
I know. I was referring to undergrad student loans (for U.S. undergrads). Most of them today accrue interest even while students are still in school.
Some people act respectful but actually despise people with academic degrees. It's all pretty messed up.
Wow, perhaps it's different in Physics vs. CS, because I really don't see that situation in CS. We have plenty of international students on DARPA and ONR funding, and it's never been much more of a problem than for U.S. citizens (DARPA got really applied and micromanaging on us with the Bush II administration).
You're exaggerating. First of all, there really aren't that many true research positions in industry, and secondly, those that are there aren't "very highly paid," they're mediocre, at best. Upper 5 digits to lower 6 digits, that's it. Smart fuckers who want the money are leaving research to go to hedge funds and the like, where mid 6 digits is common, 7 digits if you're good, 10 digits if you're absolutely wicked. Of course you have to have a special place in your heart for boring as hell and heartburn gourmet.
Oh, no kidding, I dig what you're sayin'. I was referring to doctoral studies, as well (although over here, Ph.D. == everybody thinks you're an idiot, so some people tend to leave it off their CV/resume). Five years does sound pretty quick for a Ph.D, though. Maybe the benefits help folks concentrate?
Wow man, that's awesome. We here in the U.S. don't get pension benefits, and instead of vacation time, we're just not allowed to be employed by the university for more than 11 months out of the year (so we're not classed as fulltime). Plus you got the hot Swedish babes. Too bad I don't speak Swedish (yet..!).
Ok, maybe, but people aren't competing that hotly for the crappy schools; the competition is for MIT and the like. If you look at the sizes of engineering departments, they're actually weighted towards the top departments. You might have a top-5 department with 100 profs and a rank 50 department with 10 profs. Similarly, top departments tend to have more Ph.D. students than sucky departments, because the top departments are able to get the research grants to pay the students; and if you get into a good program, you're going to be ensconced in that particular culture. Moreover, due to demand, MIT and the like generally pays LESS than some random lower-tier school. And profs generally don't go to such an institution to teach. They go there to conduct research and supervise grad students, with a little teaching thrown in as necessary. Ph.D's as a whole are already pretty high up on the scale in terms of either intelligence or hard work; oftentimes both. So if you look at the entire population, it's not as ridiculous a claim to say that 90% of Ph.D's fall in the top 10% in these regards.
Experiences as an undergrad tells you very little about what a professor actually does. Usually you have one of three scenarios in a class: an untenured lecturer, making $30-40k/year; a great professor who's either old or totally stressed out and might not get tenure; or a total blowoff professor who's actually really hard at work on other stuff (grants, research, etc.), but doesn't actually give a damn about undergrads.
I, for one, much prefer being a software developer to being a professor: easier job, more room for advancement into management, and fewer annoying kids (and you can get them fired if they're bad enough).
That's very true about the flight—bootstrapping costs. But once you're here and have been here for a couple of months, you're at a net positive compared to students who did their undergrad in the U.S. and have student loans. That's because the vast majority of graduate students in engineering do not pay for their education; they are paid modest monthly stipends. Speaking of which, I've never heard of any research assistantships or teaching assistantships at my institution that are restricted to U.S. citizens. A few fellowships, sure, but not even most of those. Probably the closest thing is that teaching assistant positions require a test of English language proficiency, but they've even gotten around that with "non contact" TAs. I guess that I'm just saying that IF you can get into a good school/department, the inequities for foreign students are about as low as they feasibly could be given reality, and the incentives are much higher, compared to domestic students (due to both social and monetary reasons).
If you're talking Microsoft software development, yes it is. There are plenty of kids with newly-minted bachelors degrees working on Windows, SQL Server, and dev tools, not to mention the lower-profile products. I know plenty of the little hellspawn.
In most urban areas, assistantships aren't enough to more than get by today. If you're on a rural campus and have no family to support, but you can probably save or pay off loans with half of it, but that's a lot slower way to pay off loans than if you had a regular job. While some student loans may charge lower interest rates while in school, the aggregate phenomenon is that the average load of student loans has steadily increased in recent years, as has the composite rate of interest accural while in school (across all loans a student has). When I was an undergrad, I didn't even think about paying for school; this made it a lot easier to fall into grad school. Nowadays, most students are up on some pretty hefty loans.
Correct. That's because International students have much lower, if any student loans to pay off, since they typically did their undergrad in their home country, and are some of the best students from their country. Domestic and International students typically do not pay much if anything for postgraduate education in engineering (other than their time).
I'm sorry, but you don't know what they hell you're talking about. Professors at good research institutions have it extremely hard. Lower hours? A crapton of time off? Not if you want to get tenure, you don't. You usually have to teach at least one class a semester (which can suck away your whole semester if you want to do the class RIGHT), and that's not even their main job, it's really just an extra annoyance thrown in on the side. Their main job is attracting grant money and conducting and supervising research. It is common for assistant professors to work nights and weekends, probably moreso than a software dev. Very common. And if you don't do that, you won't make tenure, and you'll be asked to leave the department. Then, by the time you do get tenure, you're involved in all sorts of conference program committees, invited lectures, and campus governance. It's not at all uncommon to be away from the office on business travel for weeks on end—except unlike an executive at a software company, the pay is still poor. People aren't competing for for academic jobs because they're easy, they're competing for them because of the prestige and perceived freedom.
Dude, calm down. Not all of us even want to work at Microsoft. I for one know it would be trivial for me to get a job at Microsoft or Google (I've had to turn down a few offers), but I prefer to keep working at my convenience store because I ENJOY IT! Now a gourmet ice cream store? I might go for that.