Besides the problem with wear and tear that some poeple may inflict on them, you might have a problem with the bubble keypad wearing or sticking on certain keys as you type in your PIN to get the password. The password is gotten by adding the pin modulo 10 to the currently displayed number. If you pick a PIN that is easy to add in your head then you can save on typing in the PIN.
This system is really a one time pad generated as a pseudo random sequence by the card and by the authentication server based on a common seed and starting time. The card will eventually drift out of sequence with the server and you will be required to enter some extra authentication steps to get back in sync. If you mess up with too many bad authentications, you get locked out and have to have the authentication server manually reset for your account.
Since if you know the algorithm (it's propietary with supposedly tamper resistant chips) and enough of the generated passwords, you could compromise that account, assuming you can guess the PIN before being locked out, it's a good idea not to lose or misplace the card, and to not use too trival a PIN or write it down.
is when they come up with a new marketing buzzword and then don't give you any way to connect with it. Take Throughput Computing for example. Lots of processors for multithreading. That's cool, I'm into that. But I'm far more likely to see that on an Intel processors than anything from Sun. Unique hardware? No. Unique software? No. By unique I mean can you do anything that you can't do more cost effectively on non Sun hardware and software? And the answer is no.
This allows them to take chances that they would not otherwise take if it was their money. Even if they are held responsible they take risks and really make you go thru a lot of trouble. All this because it's more convenient for their purposes. They've recently changed checking accounts so they're basically a debit card account whether you want one or not. Someone could always wire money from your account without your permission. Well, it's now gotten a lot easier. And of course you have all the protection of a debit card, that is to say none. You're protected but you have to report it to the police and wait a while for the bank to credit you. Meanwhile your checks have all bounced, your creditors are really pissed at you, and your credit rating is probably damaged beyond repair.
There's always going to be a certain amount of risk in the banking business. The banks would rather just pass the costs and risks onto their customers rather than manage and minimize the risk. As far as they're concerned it's easier and more profitable that way.
Without it, international extortion would be impossible. If you made the banks liable no matter how far the chain went, that kind of extortion would stop, just like that.
There are analogies with the telcos enabling dial out frauds by sticking it to the customer. If the telcos and banks were responsible, they'd be real careful who they gave other people's money to.
The documents they want unsealed will not show what SCO purports them to show. But SCO knows the court won't unseal the documents. But it's a nice propaganda ploy. Present impossible demands for discovery or evidence and then claim that it's someone else's fault you can't prove your case.
which is how it's usually handled in standards. Not a problem for commercial vendors who just tack the licensing fees onto their product cost. For FOSS, it's a problem.
If you take into account that it is fairly number theoretic, involves the expansion of e, and that Google's East coast research center is in NYC, it's fairly obvious they're going after graduates of the Courant Institute if you know anything about the makeup of students there and their interests.
Job seekers tend to complain about the bias of Google towards graduates of certain schools. Well, they can add one more school to the list.
the pen just does a combination of allowing you to turn the lock cylinder and jiggle the lock pins so that you can align them at the splits (or whatever you call them). Just standard lock picking techniques. I'm suprised they can open the bike locks so quickly as good locks are supposed to have features that make them pick resistent such as false splits and better pin alignment. The reason you can pick locks is because the pins aren't in perfect alignment and you can torque the lock so one pin rubs in its guide. By moving the pin, it's the one harder to move since it's rubbing, you can feel it when the split hits the cylinder boundary. Once that happens the cylinder moves a little bit more and another pin starts rubbing in its guide. Repeat for all pins. Good locks have anti-picking features. This should not happen.
If you want to practice this on a easy to pick lock, do one of the keyless cable locks. Just pull at the lock to apply pressure. Turn the numbered ring that is hardest to turn (it's rubbing) until it clicks. Repeat on other rings until lock opens.
Despite being an expert in lock-free multi-threading (or at least playing one on usenet) and having citations in some of Paul McKenney's later RCU papers and in the latest Linux RCU documentation patch, I'm having difficulty finding work. Now I realize it's because I'm a fake.
And all this time I though it might have had something to do with my resume sucks because it doesn't look like an HR wet dream. Or maybe something to do with age bias, I'm older than 20. Or maybe that companies are reluctant to hire even when they're severely understaffed. You figure something is up there when you seen the same job posted for over a year.
Look, all the dotcommers who where cabdrivers and pizza delivery guys have long gone back to their old jobs. They have previous experience that allows them to do that. Have you ever tried to break into another trade when all you have is programming experience? I have news for you. You are considered totally unskilled and your competition for the jobs that take no skills are the dregs of the workforce and they are willing to work for a lot less than you are or even can. Ever try to live on sub minimun under the table wages?
There's some kind of psychological factor here that kicks in when bad things happen to other people, that people use to convince themselves it won't happen to them because the people it did happen to somehow deserved it or brought it upon themselves. Nope. It's pure luck. You either got laid off or did not get laid off. Getting a job again seems to be pure luck (though personal connections or having a HR wet dreame resume seems to help). Think otherwise? Go ahead and quit your job and find out.
I'm talking about things like databases and file servers which use lots of threads sharing large common data structures. Conventional synchonization doesn't scale very well no matter how well you parallelize the application. Sun isn't doing anything here or hasn't said what they're up to.
The only system that anyone may be doing something on is Linux. But nobody has publicly announced anything there either.
I do have some lock-free algorithms that are portable but those aren't in widespread use. In fact, I did three different versions of RCU for preemptive user threads on Solaris just for the heck of it. Under deliberately severe contention, they really cranked, even on a single processor SB100. Worst case for RCU still did better than mutexes. Worst case for mutexes were ctl-C'd to avoid waiting forever vs. almost instant for RCU, a dramatic difference. The only thing that did better was lock-free reference counting but I wouldn't expect that to scale as well as RCU with increasing numbers of cpus.
But so far I haven't heard from Sun offering me one of these 32-ways to play on. I don't think they're serious. Talks cheap, Sun.
Normal threading techniques don't scale very well once you start getting lots of processors. That's why SGI had to do a lot of work to get Linux to run on a 100+ way. You need to develope new synchronization mechanisms like RCU to deal with the scalability issues.
Do you see Sun working on new synchronization mechanisms to deal with scalability issues? No.
Sun has never explained or shown what this Throughput computing is all about. More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it. Pthreads by itself isn't going to hack it. They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.
I don't know what a national sales tax has to do with that. I don't think it would float anyhow. The estimates I've heard by economists would be from 20% to 30% which would definitely depress consumer spending (which is why I like it). It also raises questions about things like how non tax deferred savings are grandfathered into the plan, otherwise you got taxed twice.
While it's not likely to go into effect, I think it will surface later not as a replacement but as an additional tax at a lower rate with a promise of reduction of income tax rates which somehow ends up benifiting mainly the rich.
I know you can use lock-free algorithms to iterate through collections being concurrently modified. I haven't tried it with an indexable collection but you'd want something like that to avoid having rebuild the indices everytime you modify a table.
Call the 800 number. I have a bad feeling about this. I don't think Lexmark has to replace them with a new model. They can give you a refurbished model. Of course it will still be under warranty but warranties are worth sh*t. What kind of condition it is in counts more, especially for mechanical devices. If you think otherwise, you should buy the merchandise in Best Buy in obviously crushed boxes to save $10. So the box was dropped hard enough to partly separate the components from the boards and misalign the mechanical parts. It's under warranty, right?
A side issue really, but does anyone find that being unemployed inhibits contributing to open source. It's counter intuitive since you'd think that with having more spare time, you'd be more likely to contribute. But being unemployed makes things seem more temporary and makes one more loath to make long term committments.
I already backed out of one project. Even giving advice seems problematic since you may end up having to do an actual implementation to show how it's done. Plus some concepts are just hard to get across. And not least is the irony implicit in the unemployed giving advice to someone who is totally unqualified to do the job they're got.
Probably not the best example I can come up with but you can sort of compare outsourcing to if IBM decided to disolve their printer business, lay everyone off, and sell the technology to the Taiwanese or someone, instead of spinning it off into a separate business, Lexmark, and letting the people in it succeed on their own.
The problem is with how business is done today with the concentration of intellectual property rights in the hands of the corporations. Workers have no basis to compete, even though they were the originators of the most of the intellectual property.
Everyone uses the Luddites as examples of being against progress, but the Luddites are really about who owns and controls the technology. Well, the mill owners won that battle and instead of master craftsmen making a decent living and supporting their families, we ended up with the industrial revolution with horrible working conditions with child labor because adult males weren't nimble enough to work in the new factories, the latter ending up unemployed.
Progress doesn't automatically mean things will get better. They can get worse, a lot worse. Trickle down economics didn't work back then. Today the trickle seems to be in the form of a hemorage of jobs going overseas.
We need to think about a system of empowerment and ownership that allows US workers to compete. The Shrub talked about ownership being to own your own house, but you need a job in order to pay for a house. How about ownership of work or the means to work at least?
Follow up - I took a quick look at the source.
on
APR 1.0.0 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
For the atomic operations, the intel based code is ok since the lock prefix serializes memory. The powerpc load reserved / store conditional do not however and explicit memory barriers are required and they are not there. That's bad.
For the win32 version of condvar, I don't think a win32 Event isn't going to hack it. The current logic allows a condvar to remain signaled until the all waiters have woken up and have decremented the use count to zero. This could lead to a lot of spurious wakeups if some waiting thread takes it time to wake up. The APR authors need to read that Schmidt document I mentioned earlier and maybe also look at Schmidt's ACE project and see how he did it.
This is not a comprehensive critique as I only took a cursory look but what I did see indicates that APR needs some more work.
Multi-threading isn't that simple
on
APR 1.0.0 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The atomic operations while nice are basically useless without memory visibility rules or semantics. This is something that get discussed a lot on comp.programming.threads. I suppose you can assume they are there but that's assuming a lot.
Also, doing condvars on windows isn't that easy as Douglas Schmidt writes up here.
Writing portable thread libraries seems to be a popular activity. It would be nice if the authors of those packages documented that they were aware of the issues as a first step in convincing those of us who know about those issues that they know what they are doing. Yeah, I know that the Apache authors are considered experts, but it wouldn't be the first time some rather well known experts got tripped up on multi-threading.
Especially if it entails a considerable amount of work. For example, if I think I know of a way to implement a database that is 2 orders of magnitude faster than any current database. What's in it for me?
I'm not speaking hypothetically. I've put a fair amount of non-trivial ideas in the public domain so far and it has not done me a bit of good.
for Linux. Of course if I knew what graphics cards Linux actually did support without a lot of dancing around, I could actually go out and buy a newer card. So ATI's lack of support actually doesn't hurt them since I'm not buying their competitor's cards either.
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This system is really a one time pad generated as a pseudo random sequence by the card and by the authentication server based on a common seed and starting time. The card will eventually drift out of sequence with the server and you will be required to enter some extra authentication steps to get back in sync. If you mess up with too many bad authentications, you get locked out and have to have the authentication server manually reset for your account.
Since if you know the algorithm (it's propietary with supposedly tamper resistant chips) and enough of the generated passwords, you could compromise that account, assuming you can guess the PIN before being locked out, it's a good idea not to lose or misplace the card, and to not use too trival a PIN or write it down.
is when they come up with a new marketing buzzword and then don't give you any way to connect with it. Take Throughput Computing for example. Lots of processors for multithreading. That's cool, I'm into that. But I'm far more likely to see that on an Intel processors than anything from Sun. Unique hardware? No. Unique software? No. By unique I mean can you do anything that you can't do more cost effectively on non Sun hardware and software? And the answer is no.
There's always going to be a certain amount of risk in the banking business. The banks would rather just pass the costs and risks onto their customers rather than manage and minimize the risk. As far as they're concerned it's easier and more profitable that way.
There are analogies with the telcos enabling dial out frauds by sticking it to the customer. If the telcos and banks were responsible, they'd be real careful who they gave other people's money to.
The documents they want unsealed will not show what SCO purports them to show. But SCO knows the court won't unseal the documents. But it's a nice propaganda ploy. Present impossible demands for discovery or evidence and then claim that it's someone else's fault you can't prove your case.
which is how it's usually handled in standards. Not a problem for commercial vendors who just tack the licensing fees onto their product cost. For FOSS, it's a problem.
Job seekers tend to complain about the bias of Google towards graduates of certain schools. Well, they can add one more school to the list.
If you want to practice this on a easy to pick lock, do one of the keyless cable locks. Just pull at the lock to apply pressure. Turn the numbered ring that is hardest to turn (it's rubbing) until it clicks. Repeat on other rings until lock opens.
And all this time I though it might have had something to do with my resume sucks because it doesn't look like an HR wet dream. Or maybe something to do with age bias, I'm older than 20. Or maybe that companies are reluctant to hire even when they're severely understaffed. You figure something is up there when you seen the same job posted for over a year.
Look, all the dotcommers who where cabdrivers and pizza delivery guys have long gone back to their old jobs. They have previous experience that allows them to do that. Have you ever tried to break into another trade when all you have is programming experience? I have news for you. You are considered totally unskilled and your competition for the jobs that take no skills are the dregs of the workforce and they are willing to work for a lot less than you are or even can. Ever try to live on sub minimun under the table wages?
There's some kind of psychological factor here that kicks in when bad things happen to other people, that people use to convince themselves it won't happen to them because the people it did happen to somehow deserved it or brought it upon themselves. Nope. It's pure luck. You either got laid off or did not get laid off. Getting a job again seems to be pure luck (though personal connections or having a HR wet dreame resume seems to help). Think otherwise? Go ahead and quit your job and find out.
Or you could use the Bernoulli effect to force air thru ventiducts so you wouldn't need free standing turbines. (Ok, sounds cool anyway)
The only system that anyone may be doing something on is Linux. But nobody has publicly announced anything there either.
I do have some lock-free algorithms that are portable but those aren't in widespread use. In fact, I did three different versions of RCU for preemptive user threads on Solaris just for the heck of it. Under deliberately severe contention, they really cranked, even on a single processor SB100. Worst case for RCU still did better than mutexes. Worst case for mutexes were ctl-C'd to avoid waiting forever vs. almost instant for RCU, a dramatic difference. The only thing that did better was lock-free reference counting but I wouldn't expect that to scale as well as RCU with increasing numbers of cpus.
But so far I haven't heard from Sun offering me one of these 32-ways to play on. I don't think they're serious. Talks cheap, Sun.
Do you see Sun working on new synchronization mechanisms to deal with scalability issues? No.
Sun has never explained or shown what this Throughput computing is all about. More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it. Pthreads by itself isn't going to hack it. They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.
as in here (via the
Register.
While it's not likely to go into effect, I think it will surface later not as a replacement but as an additional tax at a lower rate with a promise of reduction of income tax rates which somehow ends up benifiting mainly the rich.
I know you can use lock-free algorithms to iterate through collections being concurrently modified. I haven't tried it with an indexable collection but you'd want something like that to avoid having rebuild the indices everytime you modify a table.
Call the 800 number. I have a bad feeling about this. I don't think Lexmark has to replace them with a new model. They can give you a refurbished model. Of course it will still be under warranty but warranties are worth sh*t. What kind of condition it is in counts more, especially for mechanical devices. If you think otherwise, you should buy the merchandise in Best Buy in obviously crushed boxes to save $10. So the box was dropped hard enough to partly separate the components from the boards and misalign the mechanical parts. It's under warranty, right?
I already backed out of one project. Even giving advice seems problematic since you may end up having to do an actual implementation to show how it's done. Plus some concepts are just hard to get across. And not least is the irony implicit in the unemployed giving advice to someone who is totally unqualified to do the job they're got.
The problem is with how business is done today with the concentration of intellectual property rights in the hands of the corporations. Workers have no basis to compete, even though they were the originators of the most of the intellectual property.
Everyone uses the Luddites as examples of being against progress, but the Luddites are really about who owns and controls the technology. Well, the mill owners won that battle and instead of master craftsmen making a decent living and supporting their families, we ended up with the industrial revolution with horrible working conditions with child labor because adult males weren't nimble enough to work in the new factories, the latter ending up unemployed.
Progress doesn't automatically mean things will get better. They can get worse, a lot worse. Trickle down economics didn't work back then. Today the trickle seems to be in the form of a hemorage of jobs going overseas.
We need to think about a system of empowerment and ownership that allows US workers to compete. The Shrub talked about ownership being to own your own house, but you need a job in order to pay for a house. How about ownership of work or the means to work at least?
For the win32 version of condvar, I don't think a win32 Event isn't going to hack it. The current logic allows a condvar to remain signaled until the all waiters have woken up and have decremented the use count to zero. This could lead to a lot of spurious wakeups if some waiting thread takes it time to wake up. The APR authors need to read that Schmidt document I mentioned earlier and maybe also look at Schmidt's ACE project and see how he did it.
This is not a comprehensive critique as I only took a cursory look but what I did see indicates that APR needs some more work.
Also, doing condvars on windows isn't that easy as Douglas Schmidt writes up here.
Writing portable thread libraries seems to be a popular activity. It would be nice if the authors of those packages documented that they were aware of the issues as a first step in convincing those of us who know about those issues that they know what they are doing. Yeah, I know that the Apache authors are considered experts, but it wouldn't be the first time some rather well known experts got tripped up on multi-threading.
I'm not speaking hypothetically. I've put a fair amount of non-trivial ideas in the public domain so far and it has not done me a bit of good.
for Linux. Of course if I knew what graphics cards Linux actually did support without a lot of dancing around, I could actually go out and buy a newer card. So ATI's lack of support actually doesn't hurt them since I'm not buying their competitor's cards either.
article in the Inquirer?
Better times for techies? and the an article it references Study supports controversial offshore numbers. This is just voodoo economics revived.