Posts by ZenCoder 362 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Wake me when someone figures out a way to print the working parts of a gun in plastic and manage to produce something more dangerous than pelting someone with the bullet sing a sling shot, or an advanced rubber band gun.
Ingenuity simply can't escape the laws of physics. If a cheap printer can melt it ... your not gong to be able to make a gun out of it.
Rules for cloud storage.
1) If its sensitive, encrypt it yourself. (7-zip works for me)
2) If its important, back it up yourself. (OSX's Time machine for all cloud folders)
3) Only use services that store your data both locally and online.
4) If you use it to collaborate with others, have an alternative in place and tested for sharing files. (FTP server)
I ran into problems with AT&T's caps almost two years ago. The terms and conditions actually gave them the right to implement additional terms and conditions which they would only tell me about after I violate them.
How is that in any way legal or fair?
Many speculated AT&T implemented the cap to hurt Netflix and other alternatives to their U-Verse cable TV offerings.
Luckily I had one other broadband option and could simply do business with another company, not everyone is lucky enough to have options.
AT&T shouldn't be allowed to advertise unlimited service while having a hidden cap.
Every customer should have gotten a notice in the mail about the new limit on their unlimited service.
I personally don't do this, but I know people who use no password, and instead only allow connections from manually entered MAC addresses.
If she lets person A access her network, they can't give access to B, she can revoke access to anyone at any time without having to reset password in 10 different devices, her visitors don't have to reset passwords.
I know of many cases where someone's wifi password became too well known by their neighbors, and had to be changed. I know of zero cases where someone has had issues with neighbors spoofing their MAC addresses.
Its not how I secure my system ... but its not completely ridiculous either.
Investors intentionally buy overvalued stocks hoping to ride the bubble then sell before it bursts. Basically your betting on the market behaving irrationally.
Apparently there has been a shift and people are actually expecting the stock prices to have some reflection on the actual value of a company.
Apparently the market has become less interested in hype and more interested in antiquated notions like numbers and math.
I wonder if social / economic conditions are forcing these kids to work and if instead of protecting them, they are instead being are merely denying access to better and safer jobs, and they are now forced to work at a coal mine.
Are these local manager factories the bad guys, hiring underage labor to save a buck, or are they just trying to some hungry kid a break in life?
My first language was basic on an Atari 800 XL, then Turbo Pascal in High School, at the university level Fortran, then Modula-2.
After the first introduction to programming class, people finished their assignment in whatever language they wanted. Everyone learned C and at least some C++, Java was less popular. If you actually wanted to be taught a language it was a 1 credit hour pass/fail class, but people only took that when they needed more credits to reach full time status.
Obviously the class on x86 required assembly language and a lot of the Knowledge Based Systems/A.I. classes used languages like Scheme and LISP.
I don't think the languages you learn has much importance, unless your the type to learn just enough to get by then stop.
I personally wasn't that great a C++ programmer, until I read a couple good book on design patterns.
Everyone on my Facebook is either an actual offline friend, family or someone I went to a school with.
I don't play any of the games, block app requests.
When people spam their feed too much I just set it not to show me their posts.
I am fully aware that once I post something its out there forever and act accordingly.
I can't really see how its ever going to generate enough revenue to justify its current share prices, but the sites pretty useful.
You can copy a GPL program and sell it, but if you are obeying the GPL
a) your product will be no better than the freely downloaded one because all your modifications have to be shared.
b) your customers will know that they purchased something they could have downloaded for free
Or you can copy a GPL program, violate the GPL by selling it under a non GPL license.
a) Your customers won't know they purchased something they could have downloaded for free.
b) You don't have to share your modifications.
c) There is almost zero chance the actual developer has the money to sue you.
Everyone understands the GPL ... its just that some people want to make money scamming both their customers and the original developer.
Reading the account of one jury member ... they seemed to make the right decision based on current patent law.
Don't blame the jury, or the judicial system, they don't make the laws they just interpret them.
If you you think the patent system is broken, only Congress can fix it. Good luck they are too busy slinging mud and trying to undermine each other so spend any actual time trying to enact laws for the good of the nation.
The ultimate blame is with the voter. They act in whatever way gets the most votes. If we had intelligent well informed voters who paid attention to the details of politics we'd have politicians engaging in intelligent debate with each other and the electorate.
Don't blame the judge, the jury or the supreme court. Congress passed this law, and only congress can fix it.
When you stop to consider how much the music and recording industries contribute to campaigns, and how little your typical file sharer contributes ... I wouldn't hold my breath.
Why do companies get to lock you into a contract then unilaterally change the terms?
Someone needs to rule that these contracts are not really contracts at all and therefore unenforceable.
I don't have a smart phone, I have a cheap dumb phone and an iPod touch. I have room in my pocket and it saves me a ton of cash and keeps me from being too angry about the one sided nature of mobile contracts.
Lets say there is a company that's making a tidy profit quarter after quarter, they have a good produce people like using, it provides good jobs for its employee's sends lots of taxes to federal and local governments alike.
Then some wall street speculators decide to buy the company for an amount that is 10 times what its profits could justify, not really caring about the numbers ... just hoping to ride a bubble and get out before it pops.
Lets say that company does an incredible job and doubles or even triples its profits.
That company is now officially failing. Its profits are still only a fraction of what the gamblers on wall street would be happy with.
Its stock prices will continue to fall, at some point maybe even falling below the actual value of the company. Then some venture capitalist swoops in and tears the company apart for a quick profit. The assets go in one direction while somehow, magically all the debt goes in another.
Meanwhile this perfectly healthy company which was more the adequately providing goods & services, jobs and tax revenue the entire time ceases to exist.
Its creditors are in bankruptcy court argues over pennies on the dollar.
Its employee's are mostly on unemployment.
Its stock holders are now gambling their money elsewhere.
Its top executives rode their golden parachutes to safety.
We don't understand how human's think and reason, so we can't create the algorithms necessary to simulate human thought.
We haven't figured out an artificial way to think and reason.
Until we crack one of those two problems ... we can increase the power of computers a billion fold and we'd still just have a fancy calculator that can only do exactly what we tell it.
The government isn't freaking out and over reacting.
The media terrorized the public for ratings.
The public freaked out and wanted drastic action.
The politicians pander to the public's panic by creating security theater.
If we want a better government we need better informed voters.
It doesn't bypass security, it just randomly shuts down virtual machines you already have complete control over. The worst that could happen is that a programming error allows the user of the tool to shut down too many servers.
Well I suppose the very worse thing would be a security flaw which would allow a 3rd party to hijack the tool while its in use.
I've read rumors that someone is creating an ISP that collects and stores as little information as possible, encrypts email so even they can't read it, will only give out information when it's legally unavoidable and is willing to use its lawyers to combat frivolous information requests.
What I haven't read about is them actually opening for business, let alne offering services in my area.
Yeah Google sucks at privacy, but where's a better alternative?
Thunderbird does everything I need it to do.
1) automatically setups gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol accounts via a simple wizzard.
2) works correctly with both pop and IMAP
3) optional unification of inboxes and other folders
4) addons to reorder account listings
5) addons to find and delete duplicate messages
6) addon to sync with google contacts
I can't think of any new and exciting features I would want added, if they keep what hey have working smoothly I'm a happy camper.
Good luck with that, if American's are 6% but account for 34% of the biomass then the rest of the world has an average weight of an obese large breed house cat.
6% account for 34% means 94% account for 66%. (34/6)/(66/94) ~= 8. The average adult in the USA weight about 200 lbs. An chubby main coon (large house cat) weighs 25 pounds.
Is their really any way of recovering data from a hard drive that's been overwritten three times by random numbers. Once is enough to prevent any normal data recovery.
Since the write head will be slightly out of alignment on each pass, I suppose if your using a device that is several orders of magnitude higher in resolution you could read the current and an old track, but once its been overwritten three times, it would be a mess of overlapping magnetic fields.
You could write some software that will log the serial number and model numbers reported by the drive after its been securely erased. That way the workers can't get lazy and not process the drives.
I was curious enough to look this up, thought I would share.
Climbers average Average 123.6 death per 100k from 2003 to 2011 with around 8-9 thousand workers. Since 2009 the number dropped to 58, then 81 in 2010 and 81 again in 2010.
In comparison to other high risk professions tower climbing jumps is the 3rd most dangerous most years, but quickly jumps to the top of the list when demand is high and there is pressure to skip safety precautions.
Fisherman
Fatality rate per 100,000 workers: 116
Median wage: $27,880
Logger
Fatality rate per 100,000 workers: 92
Median wage: $38,660
Airplane pilot
Fatality rate per 100,000 workers: 71
Median wage: $115,300
Farmer and rancher
Fatality rate per 100,000 workers: 41
Median wage: $65,960
This is malware they can generate any CTR they want, or use any trick they want to enhance the CTR. The only reason its not 100% is they are trying to go undetected by both the affiliate program and the end user.
They got it half right. People are writing angry emails to Wikipedia over their horrible ads rather than running security scans.
The police in general can't be bothered with minor crimes so I'm betting the real crime is messing with an important person.
I'm also guessing that if said important person had their house broken into, mobile phone stolen, punched in the face ... the police response would also be much different than when the same crime happens to us ordinary unimportant folk.
The ITU has decided that anything significantly faster than 3G can be marketed as 4G. This is considered an acceptable compromise in the US but not in other countries with a tradition of enforcing stricter advertising and marketing regulations.
Now we got a situation where its 4G in one country, 3G in the next. If I were in charge I would have created a new and more relaxed standard called 3.5G, leaving the original 4G standard as originally specified.
I was told that Pinterest appeal to women can only be likened to a male's interest in pornography.
The flexibility these cloud services offer is amazing and is perfect for start-ups. You only pay for what you use as you are using it. If the site is successful you can instantly scale to meet the demand and then choose to invest in a more cost effective, but less flexible data center.
What I would really like to see on those charts is Pinterest's advertising revenues. I have no clue if they are hemorrhaging money or raking it in hand over fist.
I'm also curious if it is at all cost effective to maintain some on demand capacity in the cloud or whether its better to have a dedicated data center which is operating at a fraction of its potential most of the time.
You can't just go by your personal experiences when judging reliability. Random data produces lots of meaningless patterns. For example I've never had a problem with a drive evenly divisible by 12.
For any drive manufacturer X there is someone whose has first hand experience with horrible reliability from brand X.
Even if you look up long term reliability data, reliability is going to vary greatly within a manufacturer model to model. By the time there is enough information the drive is obsolete and no longer sold.
I just assume that any drive is going to die at any time, and plan your backup and recovery strategies accordingly. I always buy twice as much capacity as I need, so that I will always have room on an external for my weekly backups.
Personally I feel security warning emails should never encourage bad practices like asking people to click a link to log into their account.
Instead of a link they should instruct and encourage people to log in normally, and maybe enter a code from the email when prompted.
Otherwise you are simply training people to fall for email phishing scams.
Anyone logging in as me not only violates my privacy, but also gets access to chat logs of confidential conversations of my close friends.
I actually prefer to talk to my friends in person or on the phone, but at least half my friends use facebook for Instant messaging and as a replacement for email.
"But then there was the small print: In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will have to own an Apple iPad. No computer, off-brand tablet, or even iPhone or iPod touch will work."
Or you just buy the kindle or epub version of the same textbook, which won't have all the interactive bells and whistles, but that's hardly Apple's fault.
No one sells open books, they DRM protected books. If you have a problem with DRM your problem is with the entire digital publishing industry not Apple.
The first Apple product I purchased was an iPod touch. I played with my friends for a bit, and he was just as happy with it after owning it for several months, so I bought one. I've used it daily every since.
Pretty much the same story with the iPad. I knew people who owned one, and still felt good about the purchase months latter when the newness factor wore off.
I didn't buy either product to be fashionable or because I am an Apple fan. I bought them because I thought they would provide good value for the money, and I was not wrong.
I think a government monopoly would be far worse than what we have now. Business decisions would be based on votes and election cycles rather than reality. Companies would lobby to have everything standardized around their hardware and software.
I think what we needed is some changes that would make the market work more efficiently.
My suggestion would be to require a separation of hardware and services. If they want to finance your next phone, that would be separate from your service agreement. You'd owe each month for your plan, and for the phone (unless you already had one or chose to buy one outright). If you switch providers you'll still have to make payments on the phone or buy out the balance.
They will have to focus on providing the best possible service to keep their customers happy, instead of trying to lock them in.
This is beyond what I was taught or have worked with, but the main point about traditional databases were that they always guaranteed consistency, ACID and all that. Very important for most data storage.
However once you start breaking a database into multiple servers distributed across the globe, the costs of maintaining consistency between those individual database servers rises exponentially, until it becomes impossible to have something like Google or Facebook work in anything close to real time.
So you have distributed storage where changes propagate throughout the system but the database servers are never 100% consistent with each other.
I'd be very unhappy if my bank balance varied according to which ATM machine I was using at the moment, but if some of my friends see my status update immediately and others see it a few minutes latter, or if I get slightly different google results ... its not a big deal.
Apps being useless wastes of time? the same was said about ...
Websites
Internet
Cell Phones
Personal Computers
Computer Aided Design
Held Held Calculators
Punch cards
Home Phones
Today I Checked my bank account, paid my bills online, cashed a check by taking a picture of it, ordered a prescription refill, read my email, got an alert that my prescription, was ready, used a time tracker app to record the hours worked, and send a invoice to the client, used another app to identify a song I liked, quickly helped a friend by controlling their computer with team viewer, surfed the internet for a product manual, saved it in dropbox, then opened it for viewing in stanza. Read a programming manual in stanza. Checked the weather and tracked a 3 mile walk. Right now I'm on my iPad updating my grocery list which will then automatically sync with my iPod touch which I'll have with me at the store. Latter when I cook it will be open to the website with the recipe.
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