SHAME ON MOZILLA!What happened with prenty of already installed add-ons which suddenly got remotely deactivated by Mozilla (no choice given to the user about what to do) is UNACCEPTABLE and INEXCUSABLE since it unexpectedly left Tor Browser users exposed, without security feautres they were trusting and using in that moment to protect their privacy: a rogue move by Mozilla that could have possibly pose threat to the lives of activists and dissenters whose presence in the world wide web relies on Tor Browser. The Mozilla Foundation and those in charge of the Firefox development roadmap must be held accountable for their misconduct. Plain and simple: they acted as miscreants. Was it only a matter of carelessness?It's extremely sad to state that the Mozilla Foundation seems to be increasingly focused on its own politically biased agenda: more propaganda and far less technological care, respect and responsibility towards its user base.I call on the steering group of Tor developers: please take seriously into account the incident of such sudden deactivation of (critical) Firefox add-ons, including those bundled with Tor Browser!Firefox is an UNRELIABLE piece of software to build privacy upon. The Mozilla Foundation is an UNRELIABLE and TREASONOUS partner. Seriously, look for a viable alternative!
By the way, I think another solution that only requires generating one random number is to use the factoradic representation of the permutations. See Wikipedia entry for Factoradic in the subsection on permutations. It is an algorithm for finding the Nth permutation given an integer N. That would let you generate a random integer N from 0 to 119 and compute from that the Nth permutation of the set 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. That is elegant in that you only need one random number, but if you squint the right way at the algorithm for finding the Nth permutation it looks an awful lot like what you go through for Fisher-Yates.
One Need Only Look at ZDNet’s ‘Linux’ Section to Understand It’s a Microsoft Propaganda Oper
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At the time of this posting I am a Project Manager for an owner for a medium sized hospital project in California, taking it from concept through to opening. I hate Gantt Charts. I loathe MS Project. I'm not that keen on Primavera. But I love this thread. I like tools, visuals etc. that are intuitive, that come close to 'just working'. The main problem that comes up repeatedly in projects I have managed is that the participants don't truly understand the dependencies between tasks. And they don't know exactly what each others' tasks are. I think for small projects handled by a team of people that's done similar project multiple times before, they may well inherently understand and be sensitive to all the dependencies of a project (maybe a company installing pools at residences in the same county) - but outside of that I don't believe that's ever close enough to being true that it helps.Gantt charts are extremely bad at showing the dependencies between tasks that don't appear on the same screen / sheet of paper. Even then they only remain clear if you have a predominance of one to one dependencies. They also often have cryptic abbreviations of what the task is (because if they were long, you either get less tasks on a sheet (multiple lines in a narrow column describing the task), or you get almost no room to show the bars of the Gantt chart (long single line describing the task)) and that leads to confusion.You can get the dependencies sorted out using post-it notes on a whiteboard, if the people writing the post-its and drawing the lines between the post-its are the people who actually carry out those tasks.In projects you often have multiple many to few to many (again) relationships. And knowing exactly what the deliverable that the task is to produce can change the dependencies between tasks and the duration of those tasks.You will typically find that people disagree at first, that there are misunderstandings about what a task is (e.g. when you say "provide the design to the fabricator" do you mean a design that's on a sheet of paper in pencil, in a 2D version in a CAD computer program, in 3D in a 3DCAD computer program? Do you want the printout mailed to you? A pdf emailed to you? Or the working electronic file?). It's not true that the team knows what it's going to do and all this exercise does is get them to cough up what's sitting there in their head. The team as a collective mind does not know what it's going to do until it tries to cough it up. The importance is that after the coughing up and arguing - there's one plan describing the dependencies, and it's created by the team that's engaged to execute the plan, and because it's boxes joined together by lines. Tt's visual and it's easy to understand.For projects that are not too complex (note; the circular definition :) - ie. not so complex that what I'm about to describe will not work!) the post-its and lines can be put into Visio and made to look very nice and printed out as a record of the effort, and then some editing as people see (from the effort to neaten the lines and layout of boxes) that some if it is wrong but you soon get it to "Correct Version - draft 1". On complex projects - such as this hospital project - there is some software that I'm using that now has a graphical interface that puts real planning and scheduling intelligence into those boxes and allows you to generate a sequence of work that has dates in it that you can then start to adjust based on - is your end date late? , is the intensity of work looking crazy at certain points, does it all really need to be done?My main point is it remains in essence post-its on a whiteboard connected by lines, but it lives in software, and thus can be updated as often as is needed, and printed out (on big plotter sheets, tacked to a wall - still the best method, even smart board screens aren't as big and flexible as paper on a wall).I don't use a Gantt view at all except to visually show how a target date for the end of a sequence of tasks has slipped - seeing the slip as a visual distance hits home harder than seeing that a projected date is later than a planned date (inside the post-it box,in the post-it on a wipeboard view). The second an indeed more important part is Replanning. If you don't have a team that can replan fast, and replan often you may not succeed. On a small project, you can continually revisit the post-its (lots of) on a wipeboard (very big) and keep tweaking it, and when necessary ripping post-its off, erasing lines and completely replanning sections of it. The software I'm working with has a rudimentary editing ability that allows me to delete lines to break relationships and add lines to create them, and add boxes (tasks) and connect them in, as necessary. I.e. I'm trying to make it possible for the team to continually replan in a visual intuitive way on a complex project.It's tough to do in MS Project and even harder to do in Primavera I understand.Note: I managed a local General Contractor on a small but complex project at another hospital. He did his planning in ... Word. And it worked. I found a six page list of tasks, 1 page per week of work, with the days of the week being noted on the first couple of pages and then not on the later ones, a better visual guide to the project than a Gantt Chart. And it's much easier and faster to change. But like I said - this was a project of narrow (if tricky) enough scope for that to work. And boy did he and his crew know their work, and yes they'd being doing similar work for many many years. -- Digby (email)
Re: Digby on Gantt Charts, etc.Some planners/schedulers/managers appear to avoid Primavera, because they expect it to be too complicated. I've used P3 for 20 years or so, and don't consider it difficult, but my opioion might be biased. You can easily use it for simple networks. Then as you become familiar with the other features, it's there for you. I've frequently said that [in using Primavera] you are limited by your imagination. If you don't need to use the enterprise version, i.e. you are only working on one project at a time, then the Contractor version is a good solution and its cheaper than MSP, with all the project level features of the $4,000 P6 enterprise version. There's no excuse not to use Contractor, as a serious planning and scheduling tool. [This is just my opinion. I don't sell it; I just use it a lot and deal with users who could do better, with good tools.]Displaying logic strings got much easier when Primavera added the capability to sort activities by Float Path, then the Float Order in those paths. This solves the old problem of TF numerical sorts not allowing for different calendars. This Gantt-style plot shows the float paths very clearly, allowing us to confirm the logic, and directly see the results of conservative durations. If you are crashing the schedule, this plot shows you where to concentrate your efforts.As Digby indicates the Gantt chart has its uses, such as quickly displaying relative dates for users who won't be reviewing the network for more than a minute. The Gantt Chart is only effective with logic, if you are sorting by float paths, as above.Logic plots [frequently called PERT charts] are a planning tool. That is, when you are planning the job, you are concerned with the relationships between activities. The resultant dates are not usually considered, as they are hard to assimilate as simple date fields. It's more visual to see an activity duration, and the activities that may occur at the same time on parallel paths. The previous version of Primavera P3 3.1 presented a better logic plot that the current P6. The boxes were configured with more data and the relationship lines were more legible. Hopefully, the graphics will be improved soon.Trace Logic is another interesting logic review tool. This allows us to show the predecessor and/or successor logic before and after, respectively, a particular activity on the screen. Then, as you click on a successor activity, for example, it will now show the predecessor activities for that activity. [I believe this is limited to show 10 levels on each side of the activity at a time, which is more than you can read on the screen.] This is very interesting when you are stepping through and confirming logic.After the logic is confirmed, then a Gantt chart is plotted as a scheduling tool to confirm the flow of the work. If it appears that all the work is flowing with reasonable dates, then check that the late date bars are also reasonable. Anyone who just looks at the early dates is dooming themselves to failure, as you cannot logically perform all the work on the early dates. Always use a median curve between early/late as your target curve.Planning and scheduling is an iterative process to get the baseline to the point that the entire team agrees their input is accurate and correctly related to all the other activities.The under-appreciated power in Primavera is the very robust activity coding structure that allows you to sort and select activities. In addition to the WBS codes, you may define any number of codes fields, even hierarchical fields to 20 levels. This permits multiple ad hoc WBS structures, which don't disturb the real WBS. These codes are used to sort and select activities. For example, rather than reviewing a 30-page printout, you can filter down to the dozen or so activities you are actually interested in discussing. It's much more effective to show a subcontractor a print of his work for the next month, rather than sharing a plot of everything, and expecting him to dig out the details.Primavera is not limited to Gantt Charts, but uses a set of graphics tools for the different aspects of the planning/scheduling operation. We are now seeing more and more add-on programs that use Primavera data for 4D applications, GIS applications and very interesting graphics, which can be very illustrative and helpful. However, we need to build and maintain the network, and that starts with Post-Its or 3x5 cards on a wall, and Primavera. -- Jim Simons (email) 2ff7e9595c
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