If someone proposed that we spend a trillion dollars on building lightning rods around the country to save people from possibly being struck by lighting, you'd probably say, wow that's an incredibly dumb idea. But yet, the reality is, this incredibly dumb idea would likely end up saving more lives than what we've spent on the "war on terror".
Americans need to get a grip, we don't need the paternalistic government to protect us, after all on the last two airplane bombing attempts, it was the passengers that jumped the would be bombers. Let's all just relax a little, ask the politicians to stop spending money hand over fist in the name of safety, and let us live our lives.
If terrorism ever becomes a real problem, we can revisit this...
That's wonderful _if_ the Java library provides exactly what I need. If I want to do something somewhat non-standard then writing my custom thing in Java is going to be slow. If I have to break out into C anyhow to be fast, I might as well just write in C to begin with.
As far as I can tell neither the compiler nor the JIT do even the most rudimentary of optimizations, like CSE elimination, dead code elmination, loop unrolling, inlining, etc.
Just write 1 function that spins in a loop doing something like:
for(i=0; i 100000; ++i) { a = 5; }
The Java compiler is a joke, if they even made a little effort Java could be so much faster.
Google: "we asked the Google File System to write three copies of each file to three different disks."
Yahoo: "On the larger runs, failure is expected and thus replication of 2 is required. HDFS protects against data loss during rack failure by writing the second replica on a different rack and thus writing the second replica is relatively slow."
Google is using 4x as many disks, but writing 1.5 as much data.
I'm actually more impressed that Google is cramming 12 disks onto a single machine, how do they get them to fit?
FISA says you can start a wiretap without a warrant, but you have to get a warrant eventually.
The thing is, what the NSA is doing now is tapping _all_ phone conversations and not getting any warrants until they get a hit, then they get a warrant for that one conversation.
There was a writeup awhile back, a guy that worked for AT&T basically told what was going on. In the main San Francisco telco central office, the NSA owns a huge room, where all communications are routed. This gives them a central point to tap and monitor all conversations. I'm sure they are doing this in all of the major metro areas as well.
From an intelligence point of view, this is really the only way to collect this data, but from a civil liberties point of view its a huge violation.
The "government" just thinks we're too stupid to know what's going on, and admitting what they're doing would be a huge black eye I guess. Especially since Obama could have shut it down, but chose not to.
You know, it's kind of funny. At this point they are trying to make a moral case for this: Giving people the tools to infringe copyright is wrong.
But in countries like the USA their are companies that sell guns (locally and abroad, even sold them to the evil taliban). People will stand up and shout "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I say selling guns is more morally objectionable than providing a tool to allow copyright infringement. Torrents don't infringe, people infringe! Err, something like that.
This is a little bit different, DirecTV has a huge advantage in that there is a hardware assisted encryption mechanism. The smart card that you insert in the directv box knows how to get a valid DES key, but the smart card is pretty hard to tear open. Being able to peer inside the PC, and tear apart software like PowerDVD to see how they work make things much much simpler.
I do agree that assembly is important, it wasn't until I learned assembly (6809 for me) that I understood what a pointer was, or how it worked.
On the other hand, I think language is actually a really small part of comp sci. The language is just a mechanism for expressing the concepts you will learn. It's much much more important to learn and understand the conceptual things, like sorting, searching, trees, etc etc.
Go ahead and try, all that will happen is that services will use rotating ports and encryption to get around filters. Good luck, let the arms race begin.
This is a great class to teach kids about what science is, and what the differences between scientific theories, and a non-scientific theory is.
For example, in science a theory is supposed to be able to make predictions: I throw the apple up, and gravity accelerates the apple back down etc. Have the kids then try to explain what predictive qualities Evolution has, and what predictive qualities Creationism has.
Here's the thing about Vista, let's say that there had not been any bugs, and it worked perfectly. There still wouldn't be any reason to upgrade.
In the past, the OS upgrades contained substantial improvements that made people want the new product:
Win3.1 -> win95. Huge improvement, 32-bit apps (who remembers the horror of 16-bit addressing, huge pointers etc, that sucked)
win95 -> win2k. Great for business users, brought a better UI to NT4.
win2k -> winxp and win95->winxp. Home users started getting XP, which has a much better kernel, more stable OS than win95. Good game support. Better device driver model.
winxp -> vista? Hmm. What's the typical user get out of vista that's better. More security?
I think MS has basically already implemented all of the major features that 99% of the people want. Vista just added more cruft that didn't really add much value, and added crap like DRM that actually reduced value for their customers. And to add icing to the cake, topped it all off with a host of compatibility, performance, and driver issues that just made it a downgrade over their current product.
I love that people are saying things like "well some secret government agency might be able to do it, but they will never tell"...
Ya right. How many man years of R&D go into disk drives every year. How many different types, manufacturers are there?
Every drive I'm sure is similar in operation, but they are all different. So this mysterious government agency would have to become experts in every detail of every device from every manufacturer. Give me a break, the return on investment is way too low. If you have the person that erased the drive, just toss them in gitmo, waterboard them till they talk. Much faster and more economical!
Assuming it's possible to retrieve overwritten data on a disk (which I seriously doubt), the only people capable of doing it are the engineers that designed and created the drive device.
Well, this does exclude Area 52, they have Alien technology that can extract all data ever written to the device!~ They can also extract all of your memories from your brain cells, put on your tin foil hats!
I believe that you might be able to determine that if the current value is a 0, that at some point in the history it was a 1. And vice versa. The problem as I see it is that you wouldn't be able to determine how far in the past. Image if the disk were written:
1, 0, 0
You would probably still have some residual history of the '1'.
If you had a disk that was written exactly 1 time, and then overwritten with 0's, then I would believe you could recover some of the data. But how likely is that?
I met a guy that worked in security for Vegas a couple of years back. Back then he described to me how the security systems could identify you by the way you walk. Apparently those guys in Vegas are bit ahead of things in terms of security...
But summary: The CRX HF was a very basic car, and hence very light weight. No A/C, No power steering, no passenger or side air bags, etc etc.
The rocky mountain institute has been saying this for quite a few years, if you make the car light enough you can easily get 80mpg with today's technology.
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If someone proposed that we spend a trillion dollars on building lightning rods around the country to save people from possibly being struck by lighting, you'd probably say, wow that's an incredibly dumb idea. But yet, the reality is, this incredibly dumb idea would likely end up saving more lives than what we've spent on the "war on terror".
Americans need to get a grip, we don't need the paternalistic government to protect us, after all on the last two airplane bombing attempts, it was the passengers that jumped the would be bombers. Let's all just relax a little, ask the politicians to stop spending money hand over fist in the name of safety, and let us live our lives.
If terrorism ever becomes a real problem, we can revisit this...
I just run it and time it using the time command. Since this loop doesn't actually do anything, the optimizer should optimize it away, but it doesn't.
That's wonderful _if_ the Java library provides exactly what I need. If I want to do something somewhat non-standard then writing my custom thing in Java is going to be slow. If I have to break out into C anyhow to be fast, I might as well just write in C to begin with.
As far as I can tell neither the compiler nor the JIT do even the most rudimentary of optimizations, like CSE elimination, dead code elmination, loop unrolling, inlining, etc.
Just write 1 function that spins in a loop doing something like:
for(i=0; i 100000; ++i) { a = 5; }
The Java compiler is a joke, if they even made a little effort Java could be so much faster.
One other difference:
Google:
"we asked the Google File System to write three copies of each file to three different disks."
Yahoo:
"On the larger runs, failure is expected and thus replication of 2 is required. HDFS protects against data loss during rack failure by writing the second replica on a different rack and thus writing the second replica is relatively slow."
Google is using 4x as many disks, but writing 1.5 as much data.
I'm actually more impressed that Google is cramming 12 disks onto a single machine, how do they get them to fit?
Just like when our ancestors came to America, they all filed the proper paperwork and... oh wait a second...
I completely agree, I'd rather be holding a book/newspaper/magazine than trying to read the equivalent online.
FISA says you can start a wiretap without a warrant, but you have to get a warrant eventually.
The thing is, what the NSA is doing now is tapping _all_ phone conversations and not getting any warrants until they get a hit, then they get a warrant for that one conversation.
There was a writeup awhile back, a guy that worked for AT&T basically told what was going on. In the main San Francisco telco central office, the NSA owns a huge room, where all communications are routed. This gives them a central point to tap and monitor all conversations. I'm sure they are doing this in all of the major metro areas as well.
From an intelligence point of view, this is really the only way to collect this data, but from a civil liberties point of view its a huge violation.
The "government" just thinks we're too stupid to know what's going on, and admitting what they're doing would be a huge black eye I guess. Especially since Obama could have shut it down, but chose not to.
When it snows, the amount of the earth covered in water will increase quite a lot. It's frozen water, but um, they didn't specify.
You know, it's kind of funny. At this point they are trying to make a moral case for this: Giving people the tools to infringe copyright is wrong.
But in countries like the USA their are companies that sell guns (locally and abroad, even sold them to the evil taliban). People will stand up and shout "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I say selling guns is more morally objectionable than providing a tool to allow copyright infringement. Torrents don't infringe, people infringe! Err, something like that.
This is a little bit different, DirecTV has a huge advantage in that there is a hardware assisted encryption mechanism. The smart card that you insert in the directv box knows how to get a valid DES key, but the smart card is pretty hard to tear open. Being able to peer inside the PC, and tear apart software like PowerDVD to see how they work make things much much simpler.
I do agree that assembly is important, it wasn't until I learned assembly (6809 for me) that I understood what a pointer was, or how it worked.
On the other hand, I think language is actually a really small part of comp sci. The language is just a mechanism for expressing the concepts you will learn. It's much much more important to learn and understand the conceptual things, like sorting, searching, trees, etc etc.
Go ahead and try, all that will happen is that services will use rotating ports and encryption to get around filters. Good luck, let the arms race begin.
This is a great class to teach kids about what science is, and what the differences between scientific theories, and a non-scientific theory is.
For example, in science a theory is supposed to be able to make predictions: I throw the apple up, and gravity accelerates the apple back down etc. Have the kids then try to explain what predictive qualities Evolution has, and what predictive qualities Creationism has.
It could be a great teaching tool IMHO.
Embrace, and extinguish. ;)
Here's the thing about Vista, let's say that there had not been any bugs, and it worked perfectly. There still wouldn't be any reason to upgrade.
In the past, the OS upgrades contained substantial improvements that made people want the new product:
Win3.1 -> win95. Huge improvement, 32-bit apps (who remembers the horror of 16-bit addressing, huge pointers etc, that sucked)
win95 -> win2k. Great for business users, brought a better UI to NT4.
win2k -> winxp and win95->winxp. Home users started getting XP, which has a much better kernel, more stable OS than win95. Good game support. Better device driver model.
winxp -> vista? Hmm. What's the typical user get out of vista that's better. More security?
I think MS has basically already implemented all of the major features that 99% of the people want. Vista just added more cruft that didn't really add much value, and added crap like DRM that actually reduced value for their customers. And to add icing to the cake, topped it all off with a host of compatibility, performance, and driver issues that just made it a downgrade over their current product.
I love that people are saying things like "well some secret government agency might be able to do it, but they will never tell"...
Ya right. How many man years of R&D go into disk drives every year. How many different types, manufacturers are there?
Every drive I'm sure is similar in operation, but they are all different. So this mysterious government agency would have to become experts in every detail of every device from every manufacturer. Give me a break, the return on investment is way too low. If you have the person that erased the drive, just toss them in gitmo, waterboard them till they talk. Much faster and more economical!
Assuming it's possible to retrieve overwritten data on a disk (which I seriously doubt), the only people capable of doing it are the engineers that designed and created the drive device.
Well, this does exclude Area 52, they have Alien technology that can extract all data ever written to the device!~ They can also extract all of your memories from your brain cells, put on your tin foil hats!
I believe that you might be able to determine that if the current value is a 0, that at some point in the history it was a 1. And vice versa. The problem as I see it is that you wouldn't be able to determine how far in the past. Image if the disk were written:
1, 0, 0
You would probably still have some residual history of the '1'.
If you had a disk that was written exactly 1 time, and then overwritten with 0's, then I would believe you could recover some of the data. But how likely is that?
FTFA: "Microsoft has still sold more Xbox 360 consoles than Sony to date."
Damn, I never saw that coming!!!
Sony hasn't sold any Xbox 360 consoles, so that quote is correct!
That would mean on average half the drives fail at 1,000,000h, and that might be a bit of burden on the warranty side.
So they probably picked a number that gets them to 0.1% failure rate or lower.
It would be really interesting to see the failure curve though.
Rentals are for 24 hours, and purchases can be used on two computers. Sounds like some sort of DRM to me.
Yay I can watch on my overpriced Mac! Unlike Netflix. :(
I met a guy that worked in security for Vegas a couple of years back. Back then he described to me how the security systems could identify you by the way you walk. Apparently those guys in Vegas are bit ahead of things in terms of security...
I seriously doubt it, it wouldn't be politically smart, and might hurt their re-election bids in four years.
I found this interesting write up, that explains why:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/17/autos/honda_civic_hf/index.htm
But summary: The CRX HF was a very basic car, and hence very light weight. No A/C, No power steering, no passenger or side air bags, etc etc.
The rocky mountain institute has been saying this for quite a few years, if you make the car light enough you can easily get 80mpg with today's technology.
I agree, it's pretty tragic.
Tell them you'll redirect web traffic to their website for a monthly fee.
Nothing beats recurring income.