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“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
via Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.
Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
via Whitespace.
But I was uneasy because I was feeling jaded. I thought it was because of the typical “overdoing it†reason, but there was more to it. It was affecting my ability to think critically/deeply about a subject.
via Twitter vs. Why we can’t concentrate? | Swaroop C H – India, Technology, Life Skills.
Thanks to Sam D. for the tweet.
A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers.
via Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook:
Thanks for the pointer @mollydotcom
Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.
via The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real – Anil Dash.
We could just tick off Sprint and call it “Direct Connect”. It’s a lot like the PTT with a group receiving end.
Cleaning Up From a high level, the Bourne script would essentially ssh into each target machine, do its thing, and then exit. As part of its “thing”, the designer of the framework wanted to make sure the script cleaned up after itself so subsequent runs of the framework would not re-process old data. To accomplish this, one of the enhancements after the initial release was to add two cryptic variables that redundantly contained the project name and the version being tested. Utilizing an unpatched flaw in sudos setup to gain real root access, the script would then do the following as part of the clean up: rm -rf $var1/$var2 Ordinarily, this worked just fine, but the co-op student was unaware these SPECIFIC variables needed to be set. With them being left blank, the following was the end result upon execution of the script: rm -rf / With the script running as root on a setup with NFS which, in turn, granted access to everything on the entire UNIX/Linux network and a few Windows Servers via SAMBA, the script had a chance to do a good bit of damage… and it did. Home directories, file repositories, customer data, test results, all seemingly evaporated into nothingness.
via Bourne Into Oblivion – The Daily WTF.
My favorite shell commands
In a nanocrystalline form, cerium oxide is a powerful antioxidant because its latticework crystal structure has many vacancies that can capture oxygen, and the material has a large surface area. Self showed that nanoceria mimic the activity of superoxide dismutases (SOD), an antioxidant that can stop the deadly chain reactions caused by ROS.
Nanoceria are also able to regenerate their antioxidant abilities. “Due to this catalytic property,” explains Seal, “repeated dosing with nanoceria may not be needed, as it is with certain antioxidant vitamins.”
via Nanoparticles Explored for Preventing Cell Damage – US News and World Report.
People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time.
via Facebook | On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.
Let’s see. I’ll put these few words out there on the internets…cool, my friend just saw it. Not so cool, that creep in the next cubicle is making comments about it. Give it back! Give it back!
Oh noooooooo.
Boot Camp for Fonts
via flipping typical.
There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
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