the main.com name servers only get requests from other DNS servers. Then those secondary servers (located at ISPs, for example) serve requests from end-users.
Sure. And everybody uses the DNS servers of their upstream ISP.
The fact [is] that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities
This depends upon the amount of traffic you're handling. I suspect that the.com name servers spend more than $10/year of bandwidth and CPU time answering requests for google.com.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
Standards are useful; but yes, they do also stifle creativity and invention. With all the electronic equipment we have these days, running 60Hz 120V AC (or whatever your local standard is) through our walls is rather suboptimal; if we could supply 12V DC to our equipment instead of having an AC/DC converter inside every box, we could obtain significant savings in equipment costs, reductions in power usage (those wall warts are horribly inefficient!), and improvements in reliability.
Now, in this particular case the benefits of having a standard probably outweigh the costs of limiting innovation; but this certainly isn't going to apply in general.
Re:Don't hold us back... but don't push us, either
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child.
My experience directly contradicts this. I was pretty much a classic child prodigy -- when I was 9, I took Canada's grade 7 "Gauss" competition and was one of only five competitors to obtain a perfect score; the next year I repeated the trick with the grade 8 competition. At the same time, I was learning violin, and by age 16 I had competed against university music students (playing Ravel's Tzigane, no less) and won a chance to perform the Sibelius violin concerto with a professional orchestra.
I mention this not to boast, but rather to emphasize the following point: My parents did not push me. I did not work hard -- indeed, where most violinists practiced three hours or more each day, I rarely went beyond half an hour in a day. If I was a prodigy, I was a natural prodigy -- not one manufactured through hard work or demanding parents -- and thus one whom Weiner claimed should never have existed.
My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
What is a childhood? A child doing what he wants, or a child doing what most children want?
When I was young, countless people told me that I was wasting my childhood; in elementary school, some teachers even tried to coerce me into being a normal child by playing (athletic) games with the other children. Naturally, they were utterly wrong. My childhood was exactly what I wanted it to be; while I played Beethoven symphonies instead of baseball, I did so because I found it to be more interesting and more rewarding. If I had been forced to be "normal", that would have been robbing me of my childhood.
Weiner railed against parents who -- failing to be entirely exceptional themselves -- try to achieve their dreams by constructing exceptional children. He was quite right to do so, but we should not fall into the opposite trap. As much as parents who try to construct exceptional children do those children a disservice, so do also those parents who try to construct "normal" children.
Let children choose their path and support them along it; but whether that path is ordinary or extraordinary, we should be very cautious about trying to deter them from it.
It sounds to me like Open Source Media Inc. is getting upset because OSM Media, LLC is using a name which is similar but not identical to a descriptive name for which they've applied but not yet been granted a trademark.
I can't see how this complaint has any legal merit at all. They haven't been granted the trademark yet, and given how descriptive it is I doubt that it will be granted anyway; and what they're trying to trademark ("Open Source") is not the same as what they're complaining about ("Open Source Media").
Re:Where would you be without the uni option?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
Where would you be if you were denied the option to study at the university level?
I'd probably be a millionaire after accepting the venture capital which was offered to me in 2000. (Instead, I turned down the money because I wanted to finish my education.)
It sounds as if you were given the best. You are one of the lucky ones.
Yes and no. I can't say that the system was particularly helpful; but fortunately my parents were willing to fight. When my elementary school said "hey, we don't have anyone who can teach this kid math", my mother -- a former high school mathematics teacher with a degree from Oxford -- started turning up at my school during the normal math classes and taught me herself.
That said, the fact that I was allowed to take university courses at age 13 is not a result of luck or special treatment. Simon Fraser University had a "special entry category" called "concurrent studies" which existed specifically for the purpose of allowing high school students to take university courses (subject to course pre-requisites, of course). I was aware of this rule and took advantage of it, and I refuse to accept that I was simply "lucky" to find out what programs existed.
Don't hold us back... but don't push us, either.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I was 13, I had a choice: I could either stay in high school, or I could drop out in order to attend university full-time. I decided to stay in high school -- which is to say that my time was divided roughly equally between high school and university mathematics courses -- and I think this is one of the best decisions I ever made. Over the following four years, I learned far more at high school than I did at university, and while I ended up graduating from university at age 19 instead of age 17, I came out knowing vastly more.
No, I'm not going to talk about the merits of a well-rounded education, or the benefits of socialization. Over those four years when I split my time between high school and university, I learned far more mathematics at high school than at university. What very few people understand is that smart people learn as much by thinking as they do by being taught. By spending half of my time in a completely unchallenging environment, I was (albeit not by design) allowing myself the time I needed to discover mathematics on my own which went far beyond the undergraduate curriculum.
If my parents had pushed me into studying full-time at university, I'd have finished at age 17 with a 4.0 GPA, but I wouldn't have become a Putnam fellow, calculated the quadrillionth bit of pi, discovered a new algorithm for polynomial GCDs over number fields, published research concerning floating-point rounding errors in the FFT, or developed any of the ideas which have become central to my ongoing research. Aside from being a few years younger than average, I would have turned into a completely normal mathematics honours student.
Obviously, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with a 1st class honours degree in mathematics; but in terms of changing the world, a 19 year old doing brilliant research is a far better position than a 17 year old who knows the undergraduate curriculum but has never had to think for himself.
any time you want to analyze Google, you have to realize that they've had ten PhDs crunching the problem already for years
First, I'm not sure that this statement is even true; sure, Google has lots of PhDs, but whether as many as ten of them are actually doing research about searching is not so clear. Managing researchers is even harder than managing programmers.
Second, not all PhDs are created equal. Some do brilliant research both as graduate students and thereafter; others barely manage to achieve a degree with a great deal of assistance from their supervisors, go into industry, and never do any significant research. Certainly Google has some brilliant reseachers, but given that it tends to hire new PhDs before they've had a chance to prove themselves, I'm sure they're also have a lot of dead weight.
Finally, "crunching" a problem doesn't get you anywhere. Ideas either happen or they don't -- if anything, working too hard on a problem will diminish research output rather than increase it.
Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal [...]
Funny you should say that. When I looked at nanoblogger, I decided that it was far to complex for my taste (both in terms of volume of code and the number of unwanted features), so I wrote my own script instead.
I don't consider nanoblogger's 1295 lines of shell script, 1230 lines of CSS, and 325 lines of html templates to be "minimalist". I do consider my own 176 lines of shell script, 80 lines of CSS, and 108 lines of html -- in total, half the size of the GPL license -- to be minimalist.
6 just came out, [so] how can one possibly proclaim that the newer release is even more stable? Enough time hasnt passed yet.
Not at all. I (and many other people) have been running 6.0-BETAs since mid-July, and 6.0-RC1 since early October. This isn't just a random snapshot of HEAD; the code which became 6.0-RELEASE was frozen apart from patches approved by the release engineering team for months leading up to the release.
what motivates him? And how does he choose a new washing machine?
Well, I'm glad the important questions were asked. I know when I meet someone new, the second thing I ask is always how they choose a new washing machine.
On the maps which show storms' predicted paths, it's much easier if you can write "K" to mark a storm's position rather than "Katrina". In order to avoid confusion between storms, you obviously need to use different letters; the "full names" are just invented because the general public finds it easier to talk about "Hurricane Katrina" rather than "Hurricane K".
When they said "we'll have to use Greek letters if we run out", I assumed that they meant "use Greek names starting with the appropriate letters" (and use the Greek letters themselves as the single-character symbols on maps). Names "Athena", "Basileus", "Chronos", "Dionysus", etc. would have been really neat for tropical storms, and they'd have helped to make people more familiar with classical mythology as well.
But no, apparently they're just using the Greek letters themselves. Quite apart from being unimaginative... what happens if Hurricane Epsilon is particularly destructive and NOAA decides to retire the name? They can hardly retire a letter of the Greek alphabet.
Assumptions have no place in program correctness proofs, save those given by the spec.
True, in a sense, but also backwards. The specification should document all the assumptions made.
The parent post demanded correctness, and that what I was talking about.
My post demanded that code operated as specified, not that the specification was written first. In some cases that is necessary, but in most cases it is enough if the limitations of the code are documented, so that users will know how they should or should not use it.
For those readers out there who haven't done this in class: proving correctness is hard. Insanely hard.
That depends upon how you define "prove". Do you need to prove that your proof-verification code is correct? Do you need to prove that your compiler works? Do you need to prove that the CPU doesn't have any bugs?
If you make useful assumptions, proofs of correctness aren't too hard. In the numerical code I write, I routinely prove algorithmic correctness and floating-point rounding error bounds; it would be entirely impractical to prove such things using Hoare logic, but it is also entirely unnecessary.
Dan Bernstein has offered a guarantee for many years that djbdns and qmail are secure. Now, this is a rather vague guarantee, since the task of deciding if a reported problem is a security flaw lies with Dan Bernstein himself; but it's a start.
I'm currently writing some cryptographic code, and I intend to go considerably further: I intend to offer a guarantee not only that my code operates as specified, but also that it is not vulnerable to any side channel attacks within certain classes.
As the time-to-exploit of security flaws continually decreases, I see only one solution: Writing code which is correct in the first place. If you can do that, you can offer a guarantee. And hopefully once security becomes as larger issue to consumers, people will start looking for guarantees.
the XML format of Office 12 is not compatible with the GPL
Is the Office 12 XML format not GPL-compatible, or is the GPL not Office 12 XML format compatible? The sword cuts both ways; if we're going to complain about Microsoft using a license which isn't compatible with the GPL, we should equally complain about RMS writing a license which is compatible with very little.
Slashdot Mirror
DNS requests for which our DNS server have perfectly good responses cached
You're missing the point: If I'm trying to debug DNS problems, it's because your server doesn't have a perfectly good response cached.
any packet going from a costumer to port-53 would not go anywere but our caching DNS server. There was simply no good reason not to
Unless, say, your customers want to check that their DNS servers are working properly before delegating to them.
If I send a request to a server, I want it answered by that server -- not by a "transparent" proxy which will give a completely different response.
the main .com name servers only get requests from other DNS servers. Then those secondary servers (located at ISPs, for example) serve requests from end-users.
Sure. And everybody uses the DNS servers of their upstream ISP.
How many bridges did you want to buy, again?
The fact [is] that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities
.com name servers spend more than $10/year of bandwidth and CPU time answering requests for google.com.
This depends upon the amount of traffic you're handling. I suspect that the
having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
Standards are useful; but yes, they do also stifle creativity and invention. With all the electronic equipment we have these days, running 60Hz 120V AC (or whatever your local standard is) through our walls is rather suboptimal; if we could supply 12V DC to our equipment instead of having an AC/DC converter inside every box, we could obtain significant savings in equipment costs, reductions in power usage (those wall warts are horribly inefficient!), and improvements in reliability.
Now, in this particular case the benefits of having a standard probably outweigh the costs of limiting innovation; but this certainly isn't going to apply in general.
Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child.
My experience directly contradicts this. I was pretty much a classic child prodigy -- when I was 9, I took Canada's grade 7 "Gauss" competition and was one of only five competitors to obtain a perfect score; the next year I repeated the trick with the grade 8 competition. At the same time, I was learning violin, and by age 16 I had competed against university music students (playing Ravel's Tzigane, no less) and won a chance to perform the Sibelius violin concerto with a professional orchestra.
I mention this not to boast, but rather to emphasize the following point: My parents did not push me. I did not work hard -- indeed, where most violinists practiced three hours or more each day, I rarely went beyond half an hour in a day. If I was a prodigy, I was a natural prodigy -- not one manufactured through hard work or demanding parents -- and thus one whom Weiner claimed should never have existed.
My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
What is a childhood? A child doing what he wants, or a child doing what most children want?
When I was young, countless people told me that I was wasting my childhood; in elementary school, some teachers even tried to coerce me into being a normal child by playing (athletic) games with the other children. Naturally, they were utterly wrong. My childhood was exactly what I wanted it to be; while I played Beethoven symphonies instead of baseball, I did so because I found it to be more interesting and more rewarding. If I had been forced to be "normal", that would have been robbing me of my childhood.
Weiner railed against parents who -- failing to be entirely exceptional themselves -- try to achieve their dreams by constructing exceptional children. He was quite right to do so, but we should not fall into the opposite trap. As much as parents who try to construct exceptional children do those children a disservice, so do also those parents who try to construct "normal" children.
Let children choose their path and support them along it; but whether that path is ordinary or extraordinary, we should be very cautious about trying to deter them from it.
It sounds to me like Open Source Media Inc. is getting upset because OSM Media, LLC is using a name which is similar but not identical to a descriptive name for which they've applied but not yet been granted a trademark.
I can't see how this complaint has any legal merit at all. They haven't been granted the trademark yet, and given how descriptive it is I doubt that it will be granted anyway; and what they're trying to trademark ("Open Source") is not the same as what they're complaining about ("Open Source Media").
Where would you be if you were denied the option to study at the university level?
I'd probably be a millionaire after accepting the venture capital which was offered to me in 2000. (Instead, I turned down the money because I wanted to finish my education.)
It sounds as if you were given the best. You are one of the lucky ones.
Yes and no. I can't say that the system was particularly helpful; but fortunately my parents were willing to fight. When my elementary school said "hey, we don't have anyone who can teach this kid math", my mother -- a former high school mathematics teacher with a degree from Oxford -- started turning up at my school during the normal math classes and taught me herself.
That said, the fact that I was allowed to take university courses at age 13 is not a result of luck or special treatment. Simon Fraser University had a "special entry category" called "concurrent studies" which existed specifically for the purpose of allowing high school students to take university courses (subject to course pre-requisites, of course). I was aware of this rule and took advantage of it, and I refuse to accept that I was simply "lucky" to find out what programs existed.
When I was 13, I had a choice: I could either stay in high school, or I could drop out in order to attend university full-time. I decided to stay in high school -- which is to say that my time was divided roughly equally between high school and university mathematics courses -- and I think this is one of the best decisions I ever made. Over the following four years, I learned far more at high school than I did at university, and while I ended up graduating from university at age 19 instead of age 17, I came out knowing vastly more.
No, I'm not going to talk about the merits of a well-rounded education, or the benefits of socialization. Over those four years when I split my time between high school and university, I learned far more mathematics at high school than at university. What very few people understand is that smart people learn as much by thinking as they do by being taught. By spending half of my time in a completely unchallenging environment, I was (albeit not by design) allowing myself the time I needed to discover mathematics on my own which went far beyond the undergraduate curriculum.
If my parents had pushed me into studying full-time at university, I'd have finished at age 17 with a 4.0 GPA, but I wouldn't have become a Putnam fellow, calculated the quadrillionth bit of pi, discovered a new algorithm for polynomial GCDs over number fields, published research concerning floating-point rounding errors in the FFT, or developed any of the ideas which have become central to my ongoing research. Aside from being a few years younger than average, I would have turned into a completely normal mathematics honours student.
Obviously, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with a 1st class honours degree in mathematics; but in terms of changing the world, a 19 year old doing brilliant research is a far better position than a 17 year old who knows the undergraduate curriculum but has never had to think for himself.
any time you want to analyze Google, you have to realize that they've had ten PhDs crunching the problem already for years
First, I'm not sure that this statement is even true; sure, Google has lots of PhDs, but whether as many as ten of them are actually doing research about searching is not so clear. Managing researchers is even harder than managing programmers.
Second, not all PhDs are created equal. Some do brilliant research both as graduate students and thereafter; others barely manage to achieve a degree with a great deal of assistance from their supervisors, go into industry, and never do any significant research. Certainly Google has some brilliant reseachers, but given that it tends to hire new PhDs before they've had a chance to prove themselves, I'm sure they're also have a lot of dead weight.
Finally, "crunching" a problem doesn't get you anywhere. Ideas either happen or they don't -- if anything, working too hard on a problem will diminish research output rather than increase it.
Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal [...]
Funny you should say that. When I looked at nanoblogger, I decided that it was far to complex for my taste (both in terms of volume of code and the number of unwanted features), so I wrote my own script instead.
I don't consider nanoblogger's 1295 lines of shell script, 1230 lines of CSS, and 325 lines of html templates to be "minimalist". I do consider my own 176 lines of shell script, 80 lines of CSS, and 108 lines of html -- in total, half the size of the GPL license -- to be minimalist.
6 just came out, [so] how can one possibly proclaim that the newer release is even more stable? Enough time hasnt passed yet.
Not at all. I (and many other people) have been running 6.0-BETAs since mid-July, and 6.0-RC1 since early October. This isn't just a random snapshot of HEAD; the code which became 6.0-RELEASE was frozen apart from patches approved by the release engineering team for months leading up to the release.
The 6-STABLE branch starts with 6.0-RELEASE. The 5-STABLE branch started with 5.3-RELEASE.
From what I've seen, 6.0-RELEASE is more stable than 5.3 or 5.4.
Anyone know if there's a torrent available?
Yes. The official release announcement (which for some reason wasn't linked in the story) has a link to the torrent files.
what motivates him? And how does he choose a new washing machine?
Well, I'm glad the important questions were asked. I know when I meet someone new, the second thing I ask is always how they choose a new washing machine.
Why do they treat our tax money so callously?
It's cheaper to replace a 3 year old disk array than it is to do all the paperwork necessary to prove that it was never used.
Why does it have to be based on the alphabet?
On the maps which show storms' predicted paths, it's much easier if you can write "K" to mark a storm's position rather than "Katrina". In order to avoid confusion between storms, you obviously need to use different letters; the "full names" are just invented because the general public finds it easier to talk about "Hurricane Katrina" rather than "Hurricane K".
When they said "we'll have to use Greek letters if we run out", I assumed that they meant "use Greek names starting with the appropriate letters" (and use the Greek letters themselves as the single-character symbols on maps). Names "Athena", "Basileus", "Chronos", "Dionysus", etc. would have been really neat for tropical storms, and they'd have helped to make people more familiar with classical mythology as well.
But no, apparently they're just using the Greek letters themselves. Quite apart from being unimaginative... what happens if Hurricane Epsilon is particularly destructive and NOAA decides to retire the name? They can hardly retire a letter of the Greek alphabet.
Assumptions have no place in program correctness proofs, save those given by the spec.
True, in a sense, but also backwards. The specification should document all the assumptions made.
The parent post demanded correctness, and that what I was talking about.
My post demanded that code operated as specified, not that the specification was written first. In some cases that is necessary, but in most cases it is enough if the limitations of the code are documented, so that users will know how they should or should not use it.
For those readers out there who haven't done this in class: proving correctness is hard. Insanely hard.
That depends upon how you define "prove". Do you need to prove that your proof-verification code is correct? Do you need to prove that your compiler works? Do you need to prove that the CPU doesn't have any bugs?
If you make useful assumptions, proofs of correctness aren't too hard. In the numerical code I write, I routinely prove algorithmic correctness and floating-point rounding error bounds; it would be entirely impractical to prove such things using Hoare logic, but it is also entirely unnecessary.
DJB is an asshat... "as long as you don't use this software in ways I didn't envision, it is secure."
As I said, his guarantee is rather vague. A guarantee of this sort should explicitly state under which conditions the guarantee applies.
What do you mean by saying "I offer a guarantee that my code operates as specified"?
I'm not doing this yet, but what it will mean is "report a bug, earn some money". And also "report a security-related bug, earn a lot more money".
Dan Bernstein has offered a guarantee for many years that djbdns and qmail are secure. Now, this is a rather vague guarantee, since the task of deciding if a reported problem is a security flaw lies with Dan Bernstein himself; but it's a start.
I'm currently writing some cryptographic code, and I intend to go considerably further: I intend to offer a guarantee not only that my code operates as specified, but also that it is not vulnerable to any side channel attacks within certain classes.
As the time-to-exploit of security flaws continually decreases, I see only one solution: Writing code which is correct in the first place. If you can do that, you can offer a guarantee. And hopefully once security becomes as larger issue to consumers, people will start looking for guarantees.
I would add the condition that it must orbit a star, (to exclude moons)
Under this definition, Earth's moon is a planet.
the XML format of Office 12 is not compatible with the GPL
Is the Office 12 XML format not GPL-compatible, or is the GPL not Office 12 XML format compatible? The sword cuts both ways; if we're going to complain about Microsoft using a license which isn't compatible with the GPL, we should equally complain about RMS writing a license which is compatible with very little.