Slashdot Mirror

Thanks! That gave me the solution I needed. The key: Append "&newguid=42" to the URL for the link, and the page loads since it thinks I've visited the msid.msn.com site and gotten a GUID from Microsoft. As long as I randomize that GUID with every visit, it's a meaningless number.

Maybe I can hack together a simple server that I can redirect msid.msn.com to to generate pseudo-random GUIDs with automagically...

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Not really. The article is discussing the odds of an extraterrestrial object hitting the earth. Someone asked about the terminology being used to state the odds that that will happen. This post explains the terminology.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Actually, I think they're slightly different. An "N in M" probibility means that the probability p of that event occurring is given by p = N/M . Here, N specifies the relative number of outcomes that represent the event under consideration, and M represents the relative number of total number of possible outcomes.

In contrast, "M to N" means that if you performed M + N trials, one event would occur M times and the other would occur N times. Here, M and N represent the relative number of outcomes of two distinct events, with no statement made about the total number of possible outcomes. Often, the number associated with N is the event in question, and the "other event" is merely "the event associated with N didn't occur." In that case, the probability p that the event associated with N occurs is given by p = N / (N + M) .

So, by this argument, 1-in-2 odds is equivalent to 1-to-1 odds. The idea is that the first nomenclature specifies the likelihood of a single event compared to the total of all events, and the second nomenclature specifies the likelihood of one event relative to another event. Got that?

At any rate, with a 1-in-500 chance, the difference between 1-in-500 and 500-to-1 is negligible.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Every MSNBC link that's posted here in /. doesn't work for me. My browser just ping-pongs between two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to load a page. Does anyone have a link which actually works?

Technical details: Netscape 4.72 on Solaris, running w/ cookies off, behind two layers of proxy (one Junkbuster, one corporate). It also fails to work on my machine at home (Netscape 4.7x on Linux, proxied through Junkbuster only).

Unhelpful comments about using a crappy browser gleefully ignored.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Maybe he's a mutant cross between Weird Al and Ned Flanders. Pathologically Ecclectic Recombinant Larry.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

You can't whore for karma if you're above the karma cap. I actually lose karma for posting most of the time anyway, even if it's modded up , because inevitably someone wastes a point on a (-1, Overrated) mod. Like I care or anything.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

No, Larry Wall is "Weird Al" Yankovic without the hair.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

On the plus side for me, I carved my 17GB drive into multiple ~4GB partitions, so if there is any quadratic behavior, I cut it by a factor of 4. Actually, I should reformat those w/ 4K clusters and far fewer inodes, since I'm mostly using them for bulk CD-ROM image storage. (The bulk of the fsck time is spent checking block bitmaps and inodes. With 4K clusters, the block bitmaps are 1/4th the size, and I get far fewer indirect-blocks for huge CD images. With fewer inodes, I spend less time checking inodes that never have and never will point to files.)

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Once installed, ReiserFS looks like EXT2 to the applications, etc. You still need to "reformat" the drive, though. There isn't a way to convert the filesystem in-place when going from EXT2 to ReiserFS. (You can, however, convert an EXT2 filesystem to EXT3 in-place.)

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Re: "cat and paste": Cute. The scripts I write are too involved for that though. Like that maze solver...

Ok some questions: What do you mean "deleting the end of a line"? You mean [Shift][D] to delete from cursor to end of line? And about hjkl... Well I wrote a PacMan clone once which used those for arrows too..

Speaking of writing shells... I once wrote a "metashell" that sat over /bin/sh in shell script. It provided an alias facility, command history, and commandline editing. (The latter two with the help of a C helper program.) The alias facility was set up to integrate w/ screen so that certain programs (like vi and less)would launch their own screen window.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Ha, ha. So I take it you saw the email I sent you with my wanna-be IOCCC entry?

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Ah, but INTERCAL has prior art, with its bitwise, unary AND .

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Not that I'm saying that it isn't possible that Intel is doing this, but the fact that they suddenly submitted a bunch of patents hardly constitutes evidence.

Also, as I understand, it's pretty typical for patents on a CPU to be filed all in a burst around the same time the CPU's info's being rolled out to market. Part of the reason for this is that the patent disclosures themselves sit around in the pipeline, gradually making their way to the USPTO. Then the marketing-side of the company decides to do a Release to Market of some more details, so there's a sudden rush to flush the pipeline so that the company doesn't forego any patent protection on those patented ideas that may be presented in the RTM.

At least, that's how it looks like it works here for the patents I was involved with on TI's TMS320C6400 CPU. I won't comment further on the content of those patent applications, or the purpose behind them other than to say I think all the semiconductor companies play the same game here.

So, don't just single out Intel, 'kay? And put your conspiracy theories away. This is just business as usual, and its purpose is to give the originating company an advantage and a defensible barrier against direct competition by cloning. It just so happens that cloning is more important in Intel's world than many other worlds, so people get hypersensitive about it.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

The article says that Idea Corp actually holds most of the IP for Itanium. I'm sure they're not hurting.

And typically, patent royalties are paid per unit shipped, not per cycles executed.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

ALthough this was mod'd down as flamebait, if you have any actual hard info about what holes were 'sploited, that'd be useful to share, y'know?

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Perhaps he meant fsck? I know if I take down my machine incorrectly, I have to sit there awhile when my 17GB disk fscks, although more like 5 or 6 minutes, not anywhere near the half-hour you'd guess by interpolating from the original poster's numbers.

Are some of fsck's algorithms quadratic in nature or something?

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Gallagher. And his joke ("There's a brightness knob on the TV, but it doesn't work.") I don't think started with him.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

You obviously don't know what you're talking about. You need a couple more layers of indirection, and a bunch of Hungarian Notation thrown in for good measure.

(Tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

It works pretty good, but it gave me a horrible case of red-eye.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Thanks! Every time I see PS2, I wonder "What does this have to do with mouse and keyboard connectors?" (...which is the only lasting impression the PS/2 made on the world. Sorry, MCA may have been better than ISA and even EISA, but EISA had backward compatiblity.)

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

By the way, here's some ancient related trivia. The INTV Productions video game cartridge "Triple Challenge" integrated the previously-released Chess, Checkers and Backgammon on a single game cartridge. In its original form, the Chess cartridge came equipped with a 1K SRAM onboard, as the game required extra memory.

At the time INTV went to produce the Triple Challenge carts, they discovered that since RAM had grown in capacity over the years, 1K SRAMs weren't available in quantity for reasonable prices, and larger SRAMs were too expensive as well. They almost had to cancel the Triple Challenge cart.

That is, until they found someone with a stack of 2K SRAMs, in which half the RAM was good, the other half was bad. Since the game only needed 1K, it ignored the bad half, and off they went.

Cool, eh?

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

I used to use joe myself, as it was nearly identical to the old Turbo Pascal 3.0 editor. (Both were inspired by WordStar 2000.) Ok, have I totally dated myself yet? Honest, I'm only 25.

Believe me, Pete, once you learn an editor like VI, you can't go back. People say they get dizzy watching me edit files in VI. Also, VIM has rectangular cut-and-paste -- how could you NOT find that cool?

For scripting, I'll just use the shell, you freak! :)

Yeah, but how do you type in the shell script? When I made that statement in my earlier post, I had a specific instance in mind at work. I sent a new employee some lines to paste into his .cshrc (I won't get into Bourne vs. C shell wars here), and he pasted them in using PICO. They word-wrapped and were totally hosed. Screwed up his PATH too. Thankfully, I know the full path to VI so I was able to repair the damage.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

I don't usually need to know any PICO switches, since I don't care to use it. The people who I know that do use PICO at work are the sort that barely understand Unix anyway. (I could throw some more inflammatory fuel onto this fire, such as focus-follows-mouse, vs. focus-follows-click, and using CDE vs. anything else, but I won't.) I just get stuck cleaning up the damage.

It's good to know there is a way to turn off word-wrapping, though. I'll let the affected parties know, next time it comes up.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Sorry, Peter, but I just can't bear the thought of anyone coding in PICO! PICO is good for it's original task -- a user-friendly editor to sit inside PINE. (PICO stands for PIne COmposer.)

My main complaint about PICO is that it tries to provide the friendliness a word processor, with none of the real power of a word processor. In doing so, it loses the power of a text editor as well. I feel like I've sat down in front of Microsoft Word, except someone took away all the tool bars and hid the mouse. That, and its insistance on word-wrapping lines in contexts where it's not appropriate (line-oriented languages, anyone?) make it insuitable for hard-core work.

I like VI since I can do rather crazy edits (like the other day when I was fixing someone else's code and rewrote all expressions of the form "restrict type_qualifier type variable_name[]" as " type_qualifier type *restrict variable_name ") with a single VI command. I've even written a maze-solver in VI. Do that in PICO.

Leave PICO where it belongs -- for jotting short messages to friends via email -- and use a real editor for real editing tasks.

This isn't flamebait, and I feel it's on-topic, as the Slashdot article above directly mentioned PICO. I must say it: Friends don't let friends use PICO!

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

No, you don't. You rely on at least two very highly trained and experienced human pilots, who control the plane and make the go/no-go decisions.

Sure, but they operate on a much higher level than the rest of the plane. There's a layer or two of software between the pilot's control inputs and the actual physical mechanisms being actuated. Besides, ever hear of autopilot?

Also, isn't landing largely computer controlled? And how about the radar units in the control tower? Believe me, despite the fact that the pilot and copilot are issuing commands to the plane, your safe arrival at the airport relies on a lot of software.

--Joe
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Program Intellivision!

Long time ago I watched Frank McCourt on TV, cracking a joke about how he was confused as a child after the Pope dismissed the existance of limbo, and was perplexed as to where all the souls not baptised will go.

George Carlin did a bit on that as well, in his "I used to be an Irish Catholic" routine. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of?

--Joe
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Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart!

-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??

Not particularly. If a sig weren't interesting enough to occasionally garner a comment, then it's not worth having. :-)

--Joe
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Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart!

Remember not to offer any solutions (engineer's instinct ;-) to whatever problems they might have;

Definitely! I've run into the same problem myself. I'm always trying to help, but sometimes the right way to help is just to listen. It's hard listening and not offering suggestions or solutions, though, as it's all too tempting to either offer one, or to stop listening to avoid the temptation. Neither one's what she's looking for...

And yes, I'm an engineer too...

--Joe
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Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart!

Slightly OT, but still funny. I loved the followed quote from the linked page, about three paragraphs down (emphasis mine):

Therefore there is no need to suppose grep: p.htm: No such file or directory God's existence.

--Joe
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Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart!

As I recall, there is a small transient current during switching (basically, it's like charging a capacitor), but practically no continuous current draw. That's why LCDs are low in power.

--Joe
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Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart!