I would respect him if, say, he had used that skill for something with an overall benefit, say infiltrating and busting up a ring of scammers, but in this case, he can go to hell.
Did it occur to you that this might have been the first step in said infiltration of a ring of scammers?
If you are a (non-military) pilot, you are *required* to have a minimal working knowledge of English
If you are an academic, you are *required* to have a working knowledge of English. I was recently invited to speak at a conference in Munich. The notice stated explicitly "please note that all material must be in English".
Drone421:(Absently talking to Clippy)"Yep, I good go through each one of these.h and.c files and get the BSD copytight out of them - the states wann'a see the source"
Why would they bother? The BSD license is entirely free, unlike the GPL.
But I doubt there's much BSD licensed code inside Windows anyway... if there were I'd expect Windows to be rather more stable and well designed.
Each manufacturing plant, and each production run, is individually identifiable, but not because there is a conspiracy to tag products. They are identifiable because we're surrounded by trace elements, and smelting processes don't remove these trace impurities. Each ore deposit, and in fact each truckload of ore, will have slightly different proportions of these traces; with enough work, you can then track material back to its source.
IIRC during the cold war the US monitored soviet nuclear tests by measuring the atmospheric proportion of a few carefully chosen isotopes, and could not only work out how many nuclear tests had been performed, but how powerful the explosions were.
There are certainly some ideas which are sufficiently new and non-obvious that they deserve patent protection. I think the Fast Fourier Transform would have been one of them. But right now there's a huge number of patents being issued for stuff which is neither new nor non-obvious... and that is where the problem lies.
Let's take an example... searching for patents which include the phrase "hash table" in their title reveals ten patents.
The first patent (Dec 2001) is on a hash table which uses key mod N as an index and stores key div N inside the hash bucket (instead of storing the complete key). Hello set-associative content addressable memory. Every major cpu manufacturer has prior art on this one.
I can't make any sense out of the second patent.
The third patent is on using a hash table inside a switch to speed up finding a MAC address/port combination. Obvious to anyone with a background in algorithms: If you want to find something quickly, stick it in a hash table.
The fourth patent is on using two hash tables, and placing records into the second if they encounter a collision in the first. Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
I can't make any sense out of the fifth patent.
The sixth patent is on inserting data into a hash table by writing the data first and the key last, in order to maintain thread safeness. Obvious to anyone who has written multi-threaded code.
The seventh patent is on growing and shrinking a hash table when it gets too full (or empty). Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
The eighth patent actually looks like something intelligent; the ninth patent seems to be a duplicate.
I can't make any sense out of the tenth patent.
Ok, so out of nine distinct patents, we have five which should clearly have never been granted based on prior art or obviousness; three which I can't understand; and one which looks to be worthy of patent protection.
Here's an idea: If the USPTO grants a patent, and someone later demonstrates prior art or obviousness, the person who invalidates the patent should get to claim all the fees paid by the patent filer. I have a feeling that if this happened, we'd see a very rapid deflation in the number of dumb patents on the books.
To answer the subject (rather than the submitted question), a language is made powerful by being turing-complete.
A language is also made dangerous by being turing-complete, since useful things like knowing if any given program will halt immediately become impossible.
To me, a good language would be one which has two modes: turing-complete, and turing-incomplete. If you need to write an operating system, go for the turing-complete mode, and code very carefully; if you're writing application software, turing-incomplete mode should be sufficient, and the compiler should be able to alert you to all sorts of bugs (eg, finding all possible infinite loops, deadlocks, race conditions, et cetera).
let's say pure black is light level 0 and pure white is level 10
What do you classify as "pure white"? Typical indoor lighting? Typical outdoor lighting on a sunny day? Typical lighting when there's a thermonuclear explosion happening a kilometer away?
Pure black is well defined -- zero photons -- but pure white is, well, completely bogus.
Since there's quite a few people outside the USA who didn't get to see the offical superbowl adverts, could someone list (or link to) this year's highlights?
All I've heard about so far is some undefined beer advert, but apparently that wasn't the only popular one.
I think the best use of this would be in video compression -- if you can recognize the movement of objects between frames, you can encode how much things have moved instead of re-encoding the entire image.
Which is exactly what MPEG does... very crudely. The MPEG solution seems to be to compare a block (8x8?) of pixels with every block in the previous frame.
The fact that MPEG doesn't use anything more sophisticated than this suggests to me that there probably aren't any algorithms which consistently work better.
All the reports are saying that this supernova is "in M74"; but looking at the pictures, it looks to me like it's well outside. Is there some way of knowing how far away it is, in order to know if it is really part of M74?
I think we've managed to slashdot their nameserver. wininformant.com points at ns1/ns2.duke.com, and my traceroutes get stuck in a loop between s8-0-0.7513.den.iccx.net and Edge-Serial-1-1-Lov-CO.rmi.net.
I can't remember hearing about many *new* security holes in win2K recently.
I can't get to the article right now, so I'm not sure exactly what their argument is, but while I can remember hearing about quite a few major security holes in the unixes (I think everyone was bitten at least once by ptrace race conditions) I can't think of any similar issues in win2k.
XP, on the other hand... but we're not talking about XP here.
I've known a number of people to send two postcards because what they want to write doesn't fit on one; and they helpfully write "continued on next postcard", exactly the way that IP fragments do. And, somewhat rarer but an even closer analogue, when there has been a weight limit on lettermail, people have sent (for example) the first five pages of a long letter in one envelope, and the last three pages in a second envelope.
And then there's all the furniture which is shipped in parts for the recipient to assemble...
I'm rather surprised that anyone on/. is willing to seriously consider any of these claims to have "invented" packet switching.
Every other time that someone has claimed to have "invented" an obvious electronic analogue of a well-established mechanism, we've laughed; why is this any different? Packet switching has been used in the (snail) mail system for over a century.
Slashdot Mirror
I would respect him if, say, he had used that skill for something with an overall benefit, say infiltrating and busting up a ring of scammers, but in this case, he can go to hell.
Did it occur to you that this might have been the first step in said infiltration of a ring of scammers?
Have you done any market research to back this up?
Well, you'd be insane to use this for anything important... but yes, they have.
If you are a (non-military) pilot, you are *required* to have a minimal working knowledge of English
If you are an academic, you are *required* to have a working knowledge of English. I was recently invited to speak at a conference in Munich. The notice stated explicitly "please note that all material must be in English".
we eat salt all the time
But, of course, that hasn't stopped radical environmentalists from proposing a ban on "all use of compounds containing chlorine".
Time to circulate the "ban DHMO" petition again, I think.
Is someone a couple days late?
Or is the idea that people would use ZKS to send anonymous and untraceable Valentines?
Drone421:(Absently talking to Clippy)"Yep, I good go through each one of these .h and .c files and get the BSD copytight out of them - the states wann'a see the source"
Why would they bother? The BSD license is entirely free, unlike the GPL.
But I doubt there's much BSD licensed code inside Windows anyway... if there were I'd expect Windows to be rather more stable and well designed.
Each manufacturing plant, and each production run, is individually identifiable, but not because there is a conspiracy to tag products. They are identifiable because we're surrounded by trace elements, and smelting processes don't remove these trace impurities. Each ore deposit, and in fact each truckload of ore, will have slightly different proportions of these traces; with enough work, you can then track material back to its source.
IIRC during the cold war the US monitored soviet nuclear tests by measuring the atmospheric proportion of a few carefully chosen isotopes, and could not only work out how many nuclear tests had been performed, but how powerful the explosions were.
What percentage of these films were released in the past 3-4 months?
What percentage of these films *still haven't been released* in some places?
I'm (in the UK) still waiting to see A Beautiful Mind.
Stupid patent examiners are a problem.
There are certainly some ideas which are sufficiently new and non-obvious that they deserve patent protection. I think the Fast Fourier Transform would have been one of them. But right now there's a huge number of patents being issued for stuff which is neither new nor non-obvious... and that is where the problem lies.
Let's take an example... searching for patents which include the phrase "hash table" in their title reveals ten patents.
The first patent (Dec 2001) is on a hash table which uses key mod N as an index and stores key div N inside the hash bucket (instead of storing the complete key). Hello set-associative content addressable memory. Every major cpu manufacturer has prior art on this one.
I can't make any sense out of the second patent.
The third patent is on using a hash table inside a switch to speed up finding a MAC address/port combination. Obvious to anyone with a background in algorithms: If you want to find something quickly, stick it in a hash table.
The fourth patent is on using two hash tables, and placing records into the second if they encounter a collision in the first. Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
I can't make any sense out of the fifth patent.
The sixth patent is on inserting data into a hash table by writing the data first and the key last, in order to maintain thread safeness. Obvious to anyone who has written multi-threaded code.
The seventh patent is on growing and shrinking a hash table when it gets too full (or empty). Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
The eighth patent actually looks like something intelligent; the ninth patent seems to be a duplicate.
I can't make any sense out of the tenth patent.
Ok, so out of nine distinct patents, we have five which should clearly have never been granted based on prior art or obviousness; three which I can't understand; and one which looks to be worthy of patent protection.
Here's an idea: If the USPTO grants a patent, and someone later demonstrates prior art or obviousness, the person who invalidates the patent should get to claim all the fees paid by the patent filer. I have a feeling that if this happened, we'd see a very rapid deflation in the number of dumb patents on the books.
I think the man pages for here(1) and here(2) are broken.
To answer the subject (rather than the submitted question), a language is made powerful by being turing-complete.
A language is also made dangerous by being turing-complete, since useful things like knowing if any given program will halt immediately become impossible.
To me, a good language would be one which has two modes: turing-complete, and turing-incomplete. If you need to write an operating system, go for the turing-complete mode, and code very carefully; if you're writing application software, turing-incomplete mode should be sufficient, and the compiler should be able to alert you to all sorts of bugs (eg, finding all possible infinite loops, deadlocks, race conditions, et cetera).
let's say pure black is light level 0 and pure white is level 10
What do you classify as "pure white"? Typical indoor lighting? Typical outdoor lighting on a sunny day? Typical lighting when there's a thermonuclear explosion happening a kilometer away?
Pure black is well defined -- zero photons -- but pure white is, well, completely bogus.
Someone to whom presents may reasonably be given on Valentine's day.
Try $0 for 622mbps. God bless Internet2
You have gigabit ethernet running into your room? Oxford has more than 100Mbps IIRC, but I'm limited by the 100Mbps ethernet drop.
Gosh I like living in college.
Since there's quite a few people outside the USA who didn't get to see the offical superbowl adverts, could someone list (or link to) this year's highlights?
All I've heard about so far is some undefined beer advert, but apparently that wasn't the only popular one.
I think the best use of this would be in video compression -- if you can recognize the movement of objects between frames, you can encode how much things have moved instead of re-encoding the entire image.
Which is exactly what MPEG does... very crudely. The MPEG solution seems to be to compare a block (8x8?) of pixels with every block in the previous frame.
The fact that MPEG doesn't use anything more sophisticated than this suggests to me that there probably aren't any algorithms which consistently work better.
All the reports are saying that this supernova is "in M74"; but looking at the pictures, it looks to me like it's well outside. Is there some way of knowing how far away it is, in order to know if it is really part of M74?
It's not a slashdotting; the site went down shortly before Slashdot ran the story.
Maybe they got scared and preemptively shut down their servers as soon as they saw a request come in from slashdot's IP range?
wininformant.com fails to resolve.
I think we've managed to slashdot their nameserver. wininformant.com points at ns1/ns2.duke.com, and my traceroutes get stuck in a loop between s8-0-0.7513.den.iccx.net and Edge-Serial-1-1-Lov-CO.rmi.net.
I can't remember hearing about many *new* security holes in win2K recently.
I can't get to the article right now, so I'm not sure exactly what their argument is, but while I can remember hearing about quite a few major security holes in the unixes (I think everyone was bitten at least once by ptrace race conditions) I can't think of any similar issues in win2k.
XP, on the other hand... but we're not talking about XP here.
I wonder who the other user was when `uptime` was executed in the Aqua screenshot.
Anyone want to make guesses at how many hours Bill Gates has spent playing Carmack's games?
Do IP packets only contain a single byte payload?
I've known a number of people to send two postcards because what they want to write doesn't fit on one; and they helpfully write "continued on next postcard", exactly the way that IP fragments do. And, somewhat rarer but an even closer analogue, when there has been a weight limit on lettermail, people have sent (for example) the first five pages of a long letter in one envelope, and the last three pages in a second envelope.
And then there's all the furniture which is shipped in parts for the recipient to assemble...
I'm rather surprised that anyone on /. is willing to seriously consider any of these claims to have "invented" packet switching.
Every other time that someone has claimed to have "invented" an obvious electronic analogue of a well-established mechanism, we've laughed; why is this any different? Packet switching has been used in the (snail) mail system for over a century.