Posts by Tony Pott 27 posts • joined 8 Feb 2007
As opposed to an autistic one.
He wrote about a man whose behaviour was, he believed, indicative of autism. I pointed out that a man who was neurotypical could behave this way. Nothing I wrote implied that this behaviour was displayed by all non-autistic men: I would have to be entirely mindless to think that, and nothing I've written in this thread indicates that I am.
For you to interpret what I wrote in the way you have is irrational.
Are you qualified to diagnose autism, or are you merely saying that, from your observations, he fitted the stereotype of an autistic person?
An alternative view of this guy's behaviour is that he was a neurotypical man, fully conscious of his technical standing and that it allowed him to get away with being an asshole, so he did.
It is precisely because these worthless stereotypes persist to pollute the thought processes of otherwise rational and decent people (as I'm sure you are), that I take it so seriously when reputable tech journalists persist in perpetuating them.
Can we stop saying autism causes assholery please? It's lazy, offensive, and untrue.
The reason why many people in tech behave poorly flows not from the 'fact' (largely unsupported by data) that disproportionately many of us are autistic, but from the way we approach finding solutions to technical problems. In general, we strive to redefine the problem, and exclude what has no direct bearing on it, so that we build a simplified mental model where the solution is apparent. Because collaborative relationships are not part of any technical problem domain, they are excluded from consideration, the work needed to maintain them becomes seen as a diversion of resources, and behaviour that damages collaboration is seen as harmless.
A fix for this is not obvious, but please stop blaming autistics. We struggle to cope only in real-world social situations, and are often overly careful not to cause offense because, even if undiagnosed, we are aware of our limitations. In online interactions, which are the core of this article, we function on an equal footing with our neurotypical peers.
This article seeks to conceal a lack of understanding of the problem with a shameful attack on a vulnerable group. Please do better.
All the issues discussed flow from C running on top of a modern OS or on top of the hardware abstraction layer of the OS which is written in C, and a processor geared to servicing the needs of that OS. There it emulates a low level language, and is extremely useful doing it: so good, in fact that all modern OS's and their key libraries are written in C, and very few problems have arisen (the fact that it is possible to list named examples of problems illustrates how few they are). For every instance of a OS based system, there are a hundred embedded devices too small to require an OS, and the code there is written in C and it works on the bare metal.
The article (and the ACM piece it draws from) could more accurately be rewritten as 'C is vital to modern computing, and does it's job very well, but not perfectly.' Of course, this, while evidently true, is so evidently true as to be boring and unworthy of reporting. <troll> Much more interesting to report on the mitherings of the proponents of newer languages who don't want to do the work required to get their new toys to work well with existing infrastructure. </troll>
IIRC the issue was games. They had great difficulty creating an environment under NT that would support DOS/WIN Win9x games adequately, or at all. This was not really sorted till WinXP, so while many business machines moved to Win2K, MS introduced WinME as a (horrible) stopgap for home computing until XP was ready.
Launch pre-burst:
You know how distended the balloon can get before it is at risk of bursting, so that's what you aim for, not for a specific altitude. A couple of overlapping conductors, such as aluminium foil, can be attached so that at a certain point of distension they are no longer in contact. Cover them with an elastic membrane to keep them flat and in contact in the wind and you're done: before the balloon bursts, a circuit breaks and you're done: simple.
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As some people have almost suggested, convex screens help the user to handle glare, since reflected light appears as a line (single axis curvature) or a point (two axis curvature). In either case a slight tilt will reveal whatever is under the reflected light.
There is a joke here about fanbois rapidly rotating their wrists back and forth, the completion of which I leave as a problem for the reader.
<quote>
Noticeably absent from Sony's update was the status of passwords used to log in to the PlayStation Network. Industry practices dictate they should never be stored in clear text, but rather should be run through a one-way cryptographic hash algorithm, which converts each string in plaintext to a unique set of characters that can never be reversed.
</quote>
In practice, a lot of them can be reversed by offline brute force. If one restricted oneself to trying to crack weaker passwords: lower case, 8 characters or less (which is a significant subset of normal users), and assuming a 20 byte hash value (sha1 for instance, expressed as an integer rather than a string). A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation tells me you can build a look up table of hashes of all possible combinations of this on slightly over 6TB of disk space, which can be had easily for ~£250.
Lower case and digits, 8 chars, needs about 82 GB, which if you're able to access other people's servers, is also attainable, and in a few years can be expected to become financially viable on your local machine.
From the point of view of users, the conventional wisdom of 'choose a password that even someone who knows you couldn't guess', is superseded by 'choose a long password, that you can remember, because threat comes from people who don't know you'. Your friends might guess that your password is mrmugginsthecat, but a lower case look up table for up to 15 characters would require 6.28E22 bytes, which will not be viable for the forseeable future.
Apple used to make good, reliable, products. Sadly, this has changed. Today their QA is rubbish. Apple won't get better while they continue to be their own biggest fanbois, since this makes them incapable of recognising that they, not their customers, are the problem.
Sad really.
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