On the other hand, smaller drives are likely to be more durable. Smaller platters means shorter arms, which means less "flapping" if you apply a shock to the drive.
As far as the "abuse" is concerned, I think head crashes are a greater danger than bearings dying.
Most UPSes will detect, and shut down automatically, if you try to do something like that. Because of the imperfections in the power output -- it isn't a perfect sine wave -- plugging a UPS into another UPS could damage both of them.
So 50% of all system crashes are caused by 3rd party drivers and the other 50% are caused by Microsoft code.
No. 50% of all system crashes are caused by 3rd party drivers, and the other 50% are caused by other things.
Those other things could be bugs in Microsoft's code; but I'm sure that some of the remaining 50% is hardware failures (especially on cheap boxes with crappy power supplies).
I [don't yet] see [too] many "Made in China" laptops at the stores here in Canada.
That's beacuse companies don't like to advertise that fact. Companies often outsource their production; and as long as they do some basic testing, who will know the difference?
I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point IBM was outsourcing the production of its low-end laptops to Acer; Acer is one of the companies investing in mainland China.
IBM laptops aren't going to be labelled "Made in China" any time soon, but they could certainly have been made there.
Most people don't want the best piece of software available for a problem. They want software which is good enough. Once they've found something which is good enough, they'll probably stay with it, even if better options become available.
To take a personal example, bsdiff is a tool for generating binary patches (in particular, for upgrading software). It is measurably and quantifiably better -- that is, it produces smaller patch files -- than any other software available, both free and commercial (eg, $2750/seat). Despite this, the only place where I'm aware of bsdiff being used is in another project of my own (FreeBSD Update). Most people found a tool which was "good enough" for their needs a long time ago, and aren't going to change now.
first, I'd love to see a distro be faster than "up2date package_name" or even "aptget package_name".
FreeBSD Update. Ok, it only upgrades the base FreeBSD install, starting at binary releases, along the security branches; but it uses binary patches to dramatically cut down on the bandwidth usage (and therefore the time used). A typical install of FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE (released in October 2002) has 97 files totalling 36MB bytes which need to be updated for security reasons; FreeBSD Update does this while using under 1.6MB of bandwidth.
The vast majority of friendly fire is not even potentially self-defense -- usually the targets are never aware that they were targetted.
Eliminating friendly fire completely is not going to be easy, but eliminating "yeah, that looks like the building/tank/infantry we're supposed to drop the bomb onto" would be a good start.
Re:LinuxBIOS in flight computers
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's a training issue. Pilots need to learn that "cannot identify target" means *wait*, not *shoot now*.
Re:LinuxBIOS in flight computers
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board.
What makes you think that it takes 36 seconds to reboot their systems? That's an average time spent per flight -- we don't know how many times the systems are crashing per flight.
Also note that this covers all their computer systems, not just the actual flight control. Some systems are obviously more important than others; it probably doesn't matter if the target identification system fails for a few seconds.
Latency-to-edge-of-network has got to be the most broken benchmark I've ever seen. If your network passes its traffic off to a different network within the same city, while my network takes it halfway around the world and passes it directly to the destination machine's network, my packets are going to be staying within my network for a long time... but they'll probably reach their destination sooner than yours.
If you're going to measure how long it takes for your packets to get somewhere, make sure you also measure where your packets are getting to.
The big problem for micropayments is this: Are they automatic?
If people have to take deliberate action to spend a penny, it's not going to work; at $7.20/hour, if it takes them five seconds to read and respond to a prompt, they've spent more in their time than the penny they're paying.
However, if the payments are made automatic, a different problem takes over: People aren't culturally ready for having their money spent, by a computer, on their behalf. Never mind that every time their thermostat turns on, it's spending their money -- that's sufficiently hidden from the users.
The only way I can see micropayments becoming mainstream is if they are refundable within a given time limit -- but that would only work if people don't start "charging back" all their payments.
The easiest way (and perhaps the only way) of achieving intrusion-tolerance is by segmentation. Split a program into several parts which trust each other as little as possible (and run with minimal priviledges); even if one part is compromised, the attacker won't gain enough priviledges to do very much.
You're missing the point. chmod would still exist as a userland program; it is the kernel call which would be removed.
To the user, there would be no change; to the userland programmer, there would be no change; to the C library developer, there would be a change (to implement chmod in terms of the existing filesystem operations); and to the kernel developer there would be a change (mostly in the direction of reduced complexity due to a smaller number of necessary functions).
Look at what he said, closely. Gates didn't say that Microsoft was *inventing* new technologies; he said that Microsoft was *pushing* them.
The graphical user interface was around long before Microsoft Windows came along, but it would have taken far longer to become commonplace without Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft's contribution is not to invent the new technologies, but rather to find the new technologies which have a good chance of succeeding and pushing them forward.
Ok, software patents, patents for which vast prior art exists, blah blah blah, are generally Bad Things. But in this case I'm going to disagree.
Considering all the problems I've encountered which were introduced by "transparent" web caches, I'm inclined to say that anything -- even Evil Patents -- which makes transparent caches less popular is a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Tom must be the hardware king...
Either that, or Pair Networks know what they're doing.
On the other hand, smaller drives are likely to be more durable. Smaller platters means shorter arms, which means less "flapping" if you apply a shock to the drive.
As far as the "abuse" is concerned, I think head crashes are a greater danger than bearings dying.
Most UPSes will detect, and shut down automatically, if you try to do something like that. Because of the imperfections in the power output -- it isn't a perfect sine wave -- plugging a UPS into another UPS could damage both of them.
So 50% of all system crashes are caused by 3rd party drivers and the other 50% are caused by Microsoft code.
No. 50% of all system crashes are caused by 3rd party drivers, and the other 50% are caused by other things.
Those other things could be bugs in Microsoft's code; but I'm sure that some of the remaining 50% is hardware failures (especially on cheap boxes with crappy power supplies).
The Unix Philosophy can be stated in several ways:
"Small interconnecting components"
"Never use one program where you could use several"
"Plumbing is good"
If is a continual source of amazement to me that GNU tools (eg, tar -AcdrtuxbBCfFGhijykKlLmMnNoOpPRsSTIUvVwWXZz7) are widely used despite this.
Binary patches aren't available for these advisories yet, but they will be soon (ETA 12 hours?)
See my sig for details.
I [don't yet] see [too] many "Made in China" laptops at the stores here in Canada.
That's beacuse companies don't like to advertise that fact. Companies often outsource their production; and as long as they do some basic testing, who will know the difference?
I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point IBM was outsourcing the production of its low-end laptops to Acer; Acer is one of the companies investing in mainland China.
IBM laptops aren't going to be labelled "Made in China" any time soon, but they could certainly have been made there.
Most people don't want the best piece of software available for a problem. They want software which is good enough. Once they've found something which is good enough, they'll probably stay with it, even if better options become available.
To take a personal example, bsdiff is a tool for generating binary patches (in particular, for upgrading software). It is measurably and quantifiably better -- that is, it produces smaller patch files -- than any other software available, both free and commercial (eg, $2750/seat). Despite this, the only place where I'm aware of bsdiff being used is in another project of my own (FreeBSD Update). Most people found a tool which was "good enough" for their needs a long time ago, and aren't going to change now.
man xdelta.
No, please don't. xdelta is horrible for security patches -- the patches are much larger than necessary (eg, a factor of 5 larger).
BSDiff exists for a reason.
first, I'd love to see a distro be faster than "up2date package_name" or even "aptget package_name".
FreeBSD Update. Ok, it only upgrades the base FreeBSD install, starting at binary releases, along the security branches; but it uses binary patches to dramatically cut down on the bandwidth usage (and therefore the time used). A typical install of FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE (released in October 2002) has 97 files totalling 36MB bytes which need to be updated for security reasons; FreeBSD Update does this while using under 1.6MB of bandwidth.
The vast majority of friendly fire is not even potentially self-defense -- usually the targets are never aware that they were targetted.
Eliminating friendly fire completely is not going to be easy, but eliminating "yeah, that looks like the building/tank/infantry we're supposed to drop the bomb onto" would be a good start.
That's a training issue. Pilots need to learn that "cannot identify target" means *wait*, not *shoot now*.
Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board.
What makes you think that it takes 36 seconds to reboot their systems? That's an average time spent per flight -- we don't know how many times the systems are crashing per flight.
Also note that this covers all their computer systems, not just the actual flight control. Some systems are obviously more important than others; it probably doesn't matter if the target identification system fails for a few seconds.
Look here.
Latency-to-edge-of-network has got to be the most broken benchmark I've ever seen. If your network passes its traffic off to a different network within the same city, while my network takes it halfway around the world and passes it directly to the destination machine's network, my packets are going to be staying within my network for a long time... but they'll probably reach their destination sooner than yours.
If you're going to measure how long it takes for your packets to get somewhere, make sure you also measure where your packets are getting to.
The big problem for micropayments is this: Are they automatic?
If people have to take deliberate action to spend a penny, it's not going to work; at $7.20/hour, if it takes them five seconds to read and respond to a prompt, they've spent more in their time than the penny they're paying.
However, if the payments are made automatic, a different problem takes over: People aren't culturally ready for having their money spent, by a computer, on their behalf. Never mind that every time their thermostat turns on, it's spending their money -- that's sufficiently hidden from the users.
The only way I can see micropayments becoming mainstream is if they are refundable within a given time limit -- but that would only work if people don't start "charging back" all their payments.
The easiest way (and perhaps the only way) of achieving intrusion-tolerance is by segmentation. Split a program into several parts which trust each other as little as possible (and run with minimal priviledges); even if one part is compromised, the attacker won't gain enough priviledges to do very much.
Oh wait, I've just described qmail.
You're missing the point. chmod would still exist as a userland program; it is the kernel call which would be removed.
To the user, there would be no change; to the userland programmer, there would be no change; to the C library developer, there would be a change (to implement chmod in terms of the existing filesystem operations); and to the kernel developer there would be a change (mostly in the direction of reduced complexity due to a smaller number of necessary functions).
a Nobel Prize amounts to 10M SEK (125 K$). Mind the units !
Mind the decimal place, as well. 10M SEK = 1.25M USD.
Microsoft is already threatening them with legal action
Why is Microsoft threatening legal action? Aren't blackmail cases usually handled by the FBI?
Whatever you think of Microsoft, blackmailing them is not a legitimate solution.
Look at what he said, closely. Gates didn't say that Microsoft was *inventing* new technologies; he said that Microsoft was *pushing* them.
The graphical user interface was around long before Microsoft Windows came along, but it would have taken far longer to become commonplace without Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft's contribution is not to invent the new technologies, but rather to find the new technologies which have a good chance of succeeding and pushing them forward.
The text is the following (in unicode):
[%s] & Ed[%s] values for User Name TextBox event description. \00\00\00\0A Unexpected Type[%s] & Id[%s]
Looks like a dump from an executable file.
Shouldn't that by "Wink, wink; nudge, nudge"?
Ok, software patents, patents for which vast prior art exists, blah blah blah, are generally Bad Things. But in this case I'm going to disagree.
Considering all the problems I've encountered which were introduced by "transparent" web caches, I'm inclined to say that anything -- even Evil Patents -- which makes transparent caches less popular is a Good Thing.
According to Google, linux is at 1% and apple is at 3%.