I use spaces in order to maintain legibility across editors. That said, I normally use editors which automatically auto-indent my code with spaces anyway so there wouldn't be any time saving for me to use tabs.
If the US government wasn't so keen on spying on everyone, there wouldn't be 24 American citizens sitting as hostages in Chinese territory while the Chinese military carefully takes apart and reverse-engineers millions of dollars of US technology.
Oh wait a moment, I forgot. It's fine for the US government to spy on OTHER nations. It's only their own citizens which people don't want them to spy upon.
How about Internet Explorer? Set it to a page with a 300 second refresh, and wait for it to pop up an error message.
While you're doing that, you might as well use MRTG and have some useful information (eg, bandwidth being used, DoS attacks in progress, cpu load average...) on that page.
Anyone find a really good and cheap dedicated hosting provider? I'd love a place where we could buy our own set of 10 servers, and just pay for the space and the bandwidth, and have it be cheap.
Sound like you're looking to rent a rack from somewhere like above.net (or exodus, or level3, etc.). If you're looking for a tier 2 provider rather than one of the tier 1s, take a look at the dicussions at www.webhostingtalk.com in the advertising forum; there are a few people there who are advertising colocation space.
Cobalt makes their patches available for everyone to download and install. Sure, it takes them several weeks to make a patch available, and given that they use RedHat GNU/Linux security holes keep popping up, but there is no reason why your ISP should be more able than you to download and apply the patches.
Of course, I have to wonder why you're using a Raq anyway... I've never quite understood how $1000 of hardware plus lots of free software equals a $5000 server.
Ok guys, this is getting rediculous. "Should we learn from mistakes?" Is a pretty silly question to be asking, isn't it?
Of course you should learn from mistakes. Now that you've seen two failed dotcoms, go ahead and join a third startup and use your experience to help make sure the same thing doesn't happen again.
You don't say what field you're working in, but it is computer programming you could do much worse than to work for a few months even at a failed startup: I've had recruiters tell me that they find that the best employees tend to be people who have worked at startup companies, because that forces them to have a certain amount of flexibility and ability to think on their feet.
Why not use DVDs? They are about 4GB IIRC and while they are much more expensive than CDs (even on a $/GB basis) they are cheaper than what you're using right now.
1. It's April 2nd today, not the first. That means IT'S TIME FOR THE/. EDITORS TO STOP POSTING CRAZY STORIES.
2. If/. were to switch to FreeBSD (which IMHO would be a good idea given its long history of running major websites) it should switch to 4.x-STABLE, NOT 5.0-CURRENT... the -CURRENT tree is specifically for *development* and not intended for use on production systems.
Don't you guys ever read the fine print? Amazon has a clear policy which states that they are not responsible for errors in pricing.
In addition, while courts have upheld statutes which state that you cannot knowingly advertise incorrect prices, they have also stated that an advertisement is a solicitment and not an offer.
In other words, you might get something out of Amazon through media blackmail, but that's all it is -- they have no obligation to give you anything.
CS != Programming. Thus universities should not be teaching the "latest and greatest" programming languages (java, perl, PHP, etc.).
Instead, university CS programs should start at the beginning. Teach assembly language. Use assembly language for everything, at least for the first two years.
Why? Because in order to understand the tradeoffs involved in, say, using a hash table instead of a linked list, you have to implement them. If you have a high level language which provides hash tables for you, you'll go away with a biassed view of data structures, because you won't understand that the complexity of hash tables is usually undesirable.
Only once students have a firm grounding in the basic concepts of data structures and algorithms should they be introduced to high level languages.
The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency introduced "netfiling" to the general public this year (last year it was an invite-only pilot project). You have to use "certified" software to do this -- and there are five certified software packages, all of them commercial. The software packages produce.tax files which must be uploaded to the CCRA website.
Not only is the.tax file not in a logical format (do we really need to use a binary format for 4K files? what's wrong with a standard line-break-and-comma-delimited file?) but the format isn't documented anywhere -- meaning that even if you have done your taxes by hand and are computer literate, you can't file online without shelling out $25 for some tax preparation software.
You'd think that, considering the cost savings for the government to have people file returns electronically rather than on paper, they'd make it *cheaper*, not more expensive.
I think it rather depends upon what area you're going to be working in. Given that you chose to ask the question here, I'd guess your venture would be something computer-oriented.
In that case, I wouldn't bother forming a corporation at all. You can always incorporate later, but for now there's probably lots of paperwork you don't want to get into. Incorporation is useful in terms of shielding shareholders from damages (in particular, if you need a loan to pursue soemthing it is useful to be incorporated so that the bank can't come after you if the business fails) but in computing where the "bar to entry" is so low there really isn't much point incorporating until you start dealing with significant money -- at which point you should keep a lawyer on retainer anyway.
So, how do you "customize content" without "tracking where people go"?
By doing exactly what they say they are doing... "accurately identifying the geographic location from which users access your Web site".
Akamai has servers distributed around the world; whenever there is an incoming request, it gets passed to the server closest to the user. Simply looking at which server is handling the request allows akamai to customize content based on the geographic location of users.
Looks to me like they are classifying any inline link to a different server as a "web bug".
This is quite bogus, as evidenced by the #2 ranking of akamai; the fact that many high-traffic sites have their images served from akamai's network does not mean that akamai is tracking where people go.
If the government is going to be paying people to produce software, the software should be open for all taxpayers to use. Including closed-source software companies.
Remember how anyone who did government-funded research in the US had to put in place provisions allowing the US government to use their research for free? The same should apply, only more broadly, for government-funded software projects: Anyone who is paid by the government to produce software, should be obliged to make the software available, for free, to everyone, with no strings attached.
Oh, and WTF is a retroactive clarification? Is it supposed to be in contrast to a proactive clarification of the form "I am about to say something confusing, but what I will really mean is..."?
I know that in the days of forking webservers, perl cgi scripts, and relational databases the idea of performance is considered somewhat unimportant, but there are cases where it really does matter.
For example, when you're running calculations which would take ASCI Red a couple weeks.
Yes, there are optimizing compilers out there. Yes they do a good job on some systems. No, they don't come within a factor of two of the performance well-written assembly code achieves on x86 processors.
Programming in assembly is slow work. To optimize code well it will often take a few hours per instruction. (I've spent weeks optimizing 50-instruction loops). But if you're going to have a calculation running for several months, it is worth it.
Question: How would an astronaut just leave a glove behind? It's not like you can take the damn things off without subjecting your hand to damn close to zero pressure (which tends to cause all kinds of nasty tissue damage).
The suits the astonauts use have several layers, and it is indeed possible to remove an (outer) glove while keeping your hand intact.
One reason you might want to do this would be if you were repairing some equipment and you got something nasty on your glove (eg, oil) which might cause problems if you brought it into a room full of air.
Dreamed up by sick venture capitalists
on
Juno And Privacy
·
· Score: 2
This isn't going to work. Distributed computing over 56K dialup modems is simply commercially infeasible.
Why? Because an embarassingly parallel commercially interesting problem is an oxymoron. The interesting problems are ones which require inter-node communication of at very least tens of MB/day.
Computer scientists have known this for decades. That's why linpack is used as a supercomputing benchmark, while RC5 is not.
The interesting problems are the hard ones, the ones which aren't embarassingly parallel. The ones which can't run off of a 56K dialup modem.
MP3 compression is too slow
on
MP3 Recorders?
·
· Score: 2
What your friend is asking for is a processor using under 500mW which can perform realtime MP3 compression. That simply isn't going to happen -- MP3 is simply too complicated to perform in realtime without using a lot of transistors, ie. lots of power.
That's why CDs use raw audio, incidentally: audio compression was well understood at the time, but needed more computational power than was available in audio systems at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I use spaces in order to maintain legibility across editors. That said, I normally use editors which automatically auto-indent my code with spaces anyway so there wouldn't be any time saving for me to use tabs.
If the US government wasn't so keen on spying on everyone, there wouldn't be 24 American citizens sitting as hostages in Chinese territory while the Chinese military carefully takes apart and reverse-engineers millions of dollars of US technology.
Oh wait a moment, I forgot. It's fine for the US government to spy on OTHER nations. It's only their own citizens which people don't want them to spy upon.
What's the deal with small story bodies? I've seen stories with 1 byte, 4 bytes, 10 bytes, and 42 bytes today.
How about Internet Explorer? Set it to a page with a 300 second refresh, and wait for it to pop up an error message.
While you're doing that, you might as well use MRTG and have some useful information (eg, bandwidth being used, DoS attacks in progress, cpu load average...) on that page.
Anyone find a really good and cheap dedicated hosting provider? I'd love a place where we could buy our own set of 10 servers, and just pay for the space and the bandwidth, and have it be cheap.
Sound like you're looking to rent a rack from somewhere like above.net (or exodus, or level3, etc.). If you're looking for a tier 2 provider rather than one of the tier 1s, take a look at the dicussions at www.webhostingtalk.com in the advertising forum; there are a few people there who are advertising colocation space.
Cobalt makes their patches available for everyone to download and install. Sure, it takes them several weeks to make a patch available, and given that they use RedHat GNU/Linux security holes keep popping up, but there is no reason why your ISP should be more able than you to download and apply the patches.
Of course, I have to wonder why you're using a Raq anyway... I've never quite understood how $1000 of hardware plus lots of free software equals a $5000 server.
Ok guys, this is getting rediculous. "Should we learn from mistakes?" Is a pretty silly question to be asking, isn't it?
Of course you should learn from mistakes. Now that you've seen two failed dotcoms, go ahead and join a third startup and use your experience to help make sure the same thing doesn't happen again.
You don't say what field you're working in, but it is computer programming you could do much worse than to work for a few months even at a failed startup: I've had recruiters tell me that they find that the best employees tend to be people who have worked at startup companies, because that forces them to have a certain amount of flexibility and ability to think on their feet.
Planes don't "crash" anymore. Now they "blue screen."
Only if they're landing in the water. On land it might be a black, grey, yellow, green, or white screen.
(9x won't do threads)
Umm... no. Windows 9x supports threads -- it linux which doesn't support threads.
OTOH Windows 9x doesn't support multiple processors so I guess it cancels out in the end.
Why not use DVDs? They are about 4GB IIRC and while they are much more expensive than CDs (even on a $/GB basis) they are cheaper than what you're using right now.
Are we still in April Fools day mode? I mean, looking at the date evidently isn't enough, based on earlier stories today...
1. It's April 2nd today, not the first. That means IT'S TIME FOR THE /. EDITORS TO STOP POSTING CRAZY STORIES.
/. were to switch to FreeBSD (which IMHO would be a good idea given its long history of running major websites) it should switch to 4.x-STABLE, NOT 5.0-CURRENT... the -CURRENT tree is specifically for *development* and not intended for use on production systems.
2. If
20% of respondants stated that, given their choice of Linux distributions, they would use FreeBSD.
I wonder how many would use FreeBSD if they weren't told to restrict their choice to Linux distributions?
Don't you guys ever read the fine print? Amazon has a clear policy which states that they are not responsible for errors in pricing.
In addition, while courts have upheld statutes which state that you cannot knowingly advertise incorrect prices, they have also stated that an advertisement is a solicitment and not an offer.
In other words, you might get something out of Amazon through media blackmail, but that's all it is -- they have no obligation to give you anything.
CS != Programming. Thus universities should not be teaching the "latest and greatest" programming languages (java, perl, PHP, etc.).
Instead, university CS programs should start at the beginning. Teach assembly language. Use assembly language for everything, at least for the first two years.
Why? Because in order to understand the tradeoffs involved in, say, using a hash table instead of a linked list, you have to implement them. If you have a high level language which provides hash tables for you, you'll go away with a biassed view of data structures, because you won't understand that the complexity of hash tables is usually undesirable.
Only once students have a firm grounding in the basic concepts of data structures and algorithms should they be introduced to high level languages.
The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency introduced "netfiling" to the general public this year (last year it was an invite-only pilot project). You have to use "certified" software to do this -- and there are five certified software packages, all of them commercial. The software packages produce .tax files which must be uploaded to the CCRA website.
.tax file not in a logical format (do we really need to use a binary format for 4K files? what's wrong with a standard line-break-and-comma-delimited file?) but the format isn't documented anywhere -- meaning that even if you have done your taxes by hand and are computer literate, you can't file online without shelling out $25 for some tax preparation software.
Not only is the
You'd think that, considering the cost savings for the government to have people file returns electronically rather than on paper, they'd make it *cheaper*, not more expensive.
I think it rather depends upon what area you're going to be working in. Given that you chose to ask the question here, I'd guess your venture would be something computer-oriented.
In that case, I wouldn't bother forming a corporation at all. You can always incorporate later, but for now there's probably lots of paperwork you don't want to get into. Incorporation is useful in terms of shielding shareholders from damages (in particular, if you need a loan to pursue soemthing it is useful to be incorporated so that the bank can't come after you if the business fails) but in computing where the "bar to entry" is so low there really isn't much point incorporating until you start dealing with significant money -- at which point you should keep a lawyer on retainer anyway.
So, how do you "customize content" without "tracking where people go"?
By doing exactly what they say they are doing... "accurately identifying the geographic location from which users access your Web site".
Akamai has servers distributed around the world; whenever there is an incoming request, it gets passed to the server closest to the user. Simply looking at which server is handling the request allows akamai to customize content based on the geographic location of users.
Looks to me like they are classifying any inline link to a different server as a "web bug".
This is quite bogus, as evidenced by the #2 ranking of akamai; the fact that many high-traffic sites have their images served from akamai's network does not mean that akamai is tracking where people go.
If the government is going to be paying people to produce software, the software should be open for all taxpayers to use. Including closed-source software companies.
Remember how anyone who did government-funded research in the US had to put in place provisions allowing the US government to use their research for free? The same should apply, only more broadly, for government-funded software projects: Anyone who is paid by the government to produce software, should be obliged to make the software available, for free, to everyone, with no strings attached.
Oh, and WTF is a retroactive clarification? Is it supposed to be in contrast to a proactive clarification of the form "I am about to say something confusing, but what I will really mean is..."?
I know that in the days of forking webservers, perl cgi scripts, and relational databases the idea of performance is considered somewhat unimportant, but there are cases where it really does matter.
For example, when you're running calculations which would take ASCI Red a couple weeks.
Yes, there are optimizing compilers out there. Yes they do a good job on some systems. No, they don't come within a factor of two of the performance well-written assembly code achieves on x86 processors.
Programming in assembly is slow work. To optimize code well it will often take a few hours per instruction. (I've spent weeks optimizing 50-instruction loops). But if you're going to have a calculation running for several months, it is worth it.
Question: How would an astronaut just leave a glove behind? It's not like you can take the damn things off without subjecting your hand to damn close to zero pressure (which tends to cause all kinds of nasty tissue damage).
The suits the astonauts use have several layers, and it is indeed possible to remove an (outer) glove while keeping your hand intact.
One reason you might want to do this would be if you were repairing some equipment and you got something nasty on your glove (eg, oil) which might cause problems if you brought it into a room full of air.
This isn't going to work. Distributed computing over 56K dialup modems is simply commercially infeasible.
Why? Because an embarassingly parallel commercially interesting problem is an oxymoron. The interesting problems are ones which require inter-node communication of at very least tens of MB/day.
Computer scientists have known this for decades. That's why linpack is used as a supercomputing benchmark, while RC5 is not.
The interesting problems are the hard ones, the ones which aren't embarassingly parallel. The ones which can't run off of a 56K dialup modem.
What your friend is asking for is a processor using under 500mW which can perform realtime MP3 compression. That simply isn't going to happen -- MP3 is simply too complicated to perform in realtime without using a lot of transistors, ie. lots of power.
That's why CDs use raw audio, incidentally: audio compression was well understood at the time, but needed more computational power than was available in audio systems at the time.
When I started at university, user names were assigned via the standard flllllll system.
So I got C(olin) PERCIVA(l), and to this day I explain the spelling as '"C", followed by "PERCIVAL", minus the "L"'.