Windows is the only OS of the major three (Windows, Linux, Mac) that can get infected on the internet despite doing nothing. That's right, install it and wait. 5 minutes to 16 hours. Those aren't good statistics. So if a virus can infect your computer without you doing anything, imagine what someone who actually wanted access to your computer could do.
Read This
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Drilling the end result?
Read First
It didn't strike me until reading this article that maybe we're looking at the gas "crisis" a bit sideways. Bush was the recipient of a huge amount of corporate $$ in his first election. More so than any other politician ever received to run for President. A lot of that money came from people who make gas, drill for oil, and big businesses.
For those of you who don't know, there are a lot of businesses that want to drill for oil on the continental shelf and also in Alaska (Wild Life Refuge). Well, now with gas prices really high, it seems the perfect opportunity for Bush to make it appear that _not_ drilling is only going to cause more issues. Could it be that Bush along with corporate oil companies came up with the idea of pressuring people into wanting to drill for oil in historically protected areas?
I like seals and polar bears a lot. Sure, I've seen them in zoos and on Planet Earth (Blu-Ray or DVD) and not in the wild - but I like them just the same. I think animals might be a little put off by increased human presence. Anyone watching "Ice Truckers" knows that those oil rigs don't just magically transport oil back to the public. The oil pipelines take a long time to build and require a lot of materials to be shipped back and forth. We're not talking about a _small_ impact to start drilling.
So the question is, could fear mongering go beyond getting the US tied to a never-ending war in Iraq. Fear mongers have already convinced people to give up some essential freedoms of privacy to warrant-less wiretaps (FISA bill just passed). And can someone explain how the democrats are being so ineffective? If anyone was elected with a "Mandate" it was the democratic congress in opposition to where the country was going and yet they've managed to go along with just about everything that the White House has wanted. Sure - they passed a child health care plan and even over-rode a veto or two. But in terms of standing up and saying "we're not going to just be pushed around" they're falling short. People want law-makers to be tough on crime and keep us safe. But they clearly didn't want the wiretaps or continuations of the war in Iraq or possible wars in other nations because they voted out a huge number of republicans!
It didn't strike me until reading this article that maybe we're looking at the gas "crisis" a bit sideways. Bush was the recipient of a huge amount of corporate $$ in his first election. More so than any other politician ever received to run for President. A lot of that money came from people who make gas, drill for oil, and big businesses.
For those of you who don't know, there are a lot of businesses that want to drill for oil on the continental shelf and also in Alaska (Wild Life Refuge). Well, now with gas prices really high, it seems the perfect opportunity for Bush to make it appear that _not_ drilling is only going to cause more issues. Could it be that Bush along with corporate oil companies came up with the idea of pressuring people into wanting to drill for oil in historically protected areas?
I like seals and polar bears a lot. Sure, I've seen them in zoos and on Planet Earth (Blu-Ray or DVD) and not in the wild - but I like them just the same. I think animals might be a little put off by increased human presence. Anyone watching "Ice Truckers" knows that those oil rigs don't just magically transport oil back to the public. The oil pipelines take a long time to build and require a lot of materials to be shipped back and forth. We're not talking about a _small_ impact to start drilling.
So the question is, could fear mongering go beyond getting the US tied to a never-ending war in Iraq. Fear mongers have already convinced people to give up some essential freedoms of privacy to warrant-less wiretaps (FISA bill just passed). And can someone explain how the democrats are being so ineffective? If anyone was elected with a "Mandate" it was the democratic congress in opposition to where the country was going and yet they've managed to go along with just about everything that the White House has wanted. Sure - they passed a child health care plan and even over-rode a veto or two. But in terms of standing up and saying "we're not going to just be pushed around" they're falling short. People want law-makers to be tough on crime and keep us safe. But they clearly didn't want the wiretaps or continuations of the war in Iraq or possible wars in other nations because they voted out a huge number of republicans!
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
From Wil Shipley
Avie Tevanian had been working on Mach as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs recognized he was a star and hired him straight away. (Microsoft countered by hiring Avie's old advisor to work on NT, which is kind of like Microsoft hiring my mom because I'm a good programmer.)
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Books...
So here I am, writing a program to process data because while the program itself has taken me a couple of weeks to write, the actual process of analyzing the data would have taken me a few months to do by hand. Not to mention the extreme repetitiveness that is data processing. I had an old old C program that did something similar and I was trying to update it to a mixture of C/C++/Objective-C. The whole process wasn't too bad, I just had a question about the most efficient design - so I fired off an email to Wil Shipley, the guy behind Delicious Library and within 5 minutes he wrote me back with a fairly comprehensive answer.
Unfortunately his comprehensive answer mentioned something that had been updated about the C programming language in 1999, hence the name C99. Having never heard of this really cool ability to resize "static" arrays, I grabbed my two C reference books and looked it up. No dice... Google found me numerous references to how to use these new resizable arrays but I was wondering why my programming books failed to mention it. Turns out, that my C/C++ reference book was published in 1995. It's the second edition, and I bought it my first year of college (which was 1999). Well it turns out the 4th edition of that same book is now on the market. That and my CS program at college used a really old compiler that didn't allow for C99 is why it was all new to me.
SO moral of the story, it's good to keep books updated.
Unfortunately his comprehensive answer mentioned something that had been updated about the C programming language in 1999, hence the name C99. Having never heard of this really cool ability to resize "static" arrays, I grabbed my two C reference books and looked it up. No dice... Google found me numerous references to how to use these new resizable arrays but I was wondering why my programming books failed to mention it. Turns out, that my C/C++ reference book was published in 1995. It's the second edition, and I bought it my first year of college (which was 1999). Well it turns out the 4th edition of that same book is now on the market. That and my CS program at college used a really old compiler that didn't allow for C99 is why it was all new to me.
SO moral of the story, it's good to keep books updated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)