We use swappable drive bays at work. We have a single computer with a dozen hard drives -- each one contains a different test environment (Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinME, Chinese, Korean, etc.)
This is (to me) a lot better than using System Commander, as it's much easier to be 100% that your system is completely plain-vanilla and any weirdness can be directly attributed to your software. It's also a lot smaller form-factor than a room full of systems...
Funny, but I haven't heard the common man complaining about the internet being unreliable and needing big corporations to step in and save it. I use the internet every day and very seldom (nowadays at least) have any trouble whatsoever.
The LAST THING I want is more commercial control of the internet's core infrastructure, and I imagine most of you agree. (Disclaimer: I work at a big internet company, and nobody here's been complaining about it either). Yet this article makes it sound like businesses are up in arms about it. Does anyone else out there have that experience? Is your business complaining about the anarchistic 'net?
I have a strong feeling this is just FUD being spread by telecom companies who want a bigger piece of the pie -- can you imagine more corporate control somehow bringing costs *down*?
Uhhhh... no I'm not. One of the factors is guaranteed to be less than or equal to the square root. We're only trying to find that one -- once you've found that number, you've found both of them. The other one is the quotient of the division, and the fact that it is an integer shows you that you've just found the factors. *No shit* one of the numbers will be bigger than the square root -- given that the number will never be a perfect square (since we choose two different primes) this is absolutely guaranteed.
Did you actually read my message? If you did, please read it again. My whole point was how dumb a brute force algorithm was -- I sincerely hope you didn't think that I was suggesting that taking far longer than the lifespan of the universe to solve the problem was reasonable.
Please define "trivial", 'cause I don't think we're using the same definition of it.
I don't know how many primes there are below 10^617, but here's a hint: it's a LOT. A lot a lot. I don't know what the ratio of primes to nonprimes if, but let's just assume that 1 in 1 trillion numbers up to that level is prime (and I imagine that's conservative). 1 trillion is 1,000,000,000,000, or 10^12. So that reduces our number of primes down to 10^605. That's still a 605-digit number of them. Say it's only 1 in 100 quadrillion numbers -- still 10^600 primes.
So in order to solve the problem, you just attempt to divide the big number by each of the primes, and when you get an integral result, you stop. In fact, you only have use primes up to the square root of the number. The square root of 10^600 is 10^300. Assume you have a super-duper fast machine which can divide such an insanely huge number in just, say, 10 clock cycles, and it runs at 10GHz. That's a billion checks per second (10^9) -- really fast, huh?
So let's figure out how long our super-fast machine would take to crack this code using your method. 10^300 checks, divided by 10^9 checks per second, gives you 10^291 seconds. There are approximately 31,557,600 seconds in a year, or 3.15 * 10^7. 10^291 / (3.15 * 10^7) = 3.17 * 10^283. That's 31.7 million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million years.
I'm glad to know, however, that I can now file this problem away in my "trivial" category.
Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn't get too optimistic without further details.
Consider the way the electron gun works -- you essentially have a pretty powerful (relatively speaking) stream of electrons hitting each phosphor for a very very short period of time, and then the phosphor glows for a sixtieth of a second or so.
Basically, the IBM design replaces the single gun with a matrix of them, which sounds like a win -- except that now the energy you were pumping into a single electron gun is spread out among 1.92 million of them (1600x1200 screen). Making each gun as strong as the original but "always on" would cause the monitor to suck up 1.92 million times as much energy, assuming equal efficiency. Naturally if the gun is always on it wouldn't need to be anywhere near as powerful as the original, but I'd bet that 1/1,920,000 of a normal gun's power probably isn't enough.
In any case, to keep the power consumption of the monitor reasonable, there appear to be only three options: A) dramatically reduce the power of the guns (by a factor of almost two million), B) "flicker" them, firing only for very brief periods, or C) some combination of the above.
I'd bet that (C) is most likely: that the guns will be weaker and fire in bursts. I could be totally wrong, of course, as I don't actually know anything about the technology they're using -- but it seems like a reasonable assumption. So anyway, chances are (at least until further information proves me wrong) there will still be a refresh rate. Of course, it might be a really really fast refresh rate (say 1000Hz) which would be just as good as always on, but I'd say wait until more details surface before getting excited.
Tempting as it might be to go after the virus writers when something like this happens, the real problem is the buggy insecure code which lets it happen in the first place.
I'm not just picking on Microsoft - open-source projects have had their fair share of security holes as well.
But the fact is that Outlook, ISS, and various other products didn't even have security as an afterthought, it was just no thought at all. The charge shouldn't be "kill the virus writers", it should be "stop buying unsecure software".
After all, if you left your front door open for a week, and someone made off with your stereo, I'd argue that you had it coming. I'm not sure viruses are any different -- we just need to secure our damned software.
That's funny. I live in San Jose, one of the largest cities in the country, and given the high technophile rate here I'd expect a good digital cable adoption rate (everybody I know has it, at least).
Our AT&T digital cable is great. No artifacts, no stutters, great color, great sound. Must be something other than just the number of people using it which is causing your lousy service.
The scary part is that technology is all anyone ever talks about with respect to this movie. It's all about how great the effects are and how realistic the humans look, but the story line (IMHO) is crap.
This reminds me of Lionhead's Black & White: a ton of very talented people get together, create some awesome technology for technology's sake, endlesslu talk about how great the technology is, and when you view the final product it turns out that they've apparently worked very hard to leech every ounce of fun out of it. Expect this film to absolutely tank after the first week.
I should first say that I'm totally in favor of this and think it's a really cool idea.
However, I can already hear the privacy advocates screaming "big brother". People freaked out about serial numbers embedded in processors, after all -- can you really imagine that nobody's going to complain about companies implementing technology to track them wherever they go?
I hope not, but this just seems like exactly the sort of thing privacy nuts latch on to.
No, I just want to live in a world where we can respect one anothers' property.
Something that most Slashdotters don't seem particularly good at, I might add (how many Napster fans are there in the audience? How many still use it now that you can't trade copyrighted songs? Thought so.)
"If they wanted GAIM, they should have registered that as well"
So I should be able to create a cookie called, say, Nilli Wafers, and market them under the brand Nabisci, because Nabisco didn't register these particular variations on their trademarks? Envision a world in which I could get away with this, and tell me that unscrupulous people wouldn't take ridiculous advantage of it. Would you rather have that instead?
I'm sorry, I know this is Anti-Open-Source (TM), but I think that GAIM is clearly trademark infringement. Adding one letter does not mean you're safe, any more than a clone of Windows named GWindows would be reasonable.
The whole point is consumer confusion, and you've got to remember that the average consumer probably can't name the president. The average user wouldn't find it too touch to miss one letter when the products do the exact same thing.
I love the line "Also, we note that the Gaim software was released almost two years before your client submitted its application for registration of the "AIM" mark"... This sentence might just have a *tad* more impact if, in fact, you actually had to register a trademark in order to claim it. Trademarks are like copyrights -- the fact that a trademark has not been officially registered in no way means it isn't valid. Lawyer-speak at its best.
In any case, this isn't 'fighting the good fight'. This is wasting time, money, and effort that could be much better spent accomplishing something actually useful. Change the damned name and move on.
Hasn't anyone considered the possibility that this is a hoax? I've read four or five articles saying this exact same thing for the past few weeks, and not one has been more specific than "according to our sources".
"According to our sources"? What, like our government would make a silly request like this and then refuse to talk to the press about it? Which branch of the government or military made the request? Which committee debated doing this? Who was ultimately responsible for the decision? What experts solemnly related their opinions that DVD technology is somehow dangerous? Are DVD-ROM drives banned in China? How about DVD players?
The complete lack of such details in any of these articles makes me very, very suspicious of their veracity. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of people were actually dumb enough to think that Saddam Hussein was somehow interested in PS2 technology for military use -- haven't we heard this story before?
You've got to be kidding me -- as if they could build a dojo in the ISS? Every space vehicle I've ever seen is severely space-constrained, and I can't imagine the ISS being much better.
The idea of fitting a film crew, sound crew, director, actors, costumes, and props up there, not to mention the expense of training the humans for outer space and launching them (and dealing with a few days of severe nausea), makes the idea of filming something akin to the Matrix in space absolutely laughable. This will *not* get used for Hollywood-style movies.
Not really sure what you would use it for, actually. Discovery Channel specials? That seems a lot more believable.
I'd strongly disagree with that. Nobody, nowhere, writes optimal code. What good does it do you if you can prove that language FooBar has the best optimal implementation of problem X, but nobody in the real world actually writes it that way? (Hint: none at all)
I think the important metric is not that the programs are optimal, but that they are representative of what a programmer of average skill in a particular language would produce. After all, one of the benefits of a good language is how easy it is to use -- and we presume that this ease of use will be reflected by better-written benchmarks. It's a lot easier, for instance, to write good code in Java or Smalltalk than in assembly, so why shouldn't those languages be able to show some benefit from that in a test like this?
Of course, ease of use is impossible to quantify in a test like this, but I'd argue that shooting for optimal (i.e. written by somebody far more skilled than an average programmer) will seriously distort one's expectations of real-world usability of these languages.
Did you read my whole comment, or stop after the first paragraph? Just wondering.
You're deluding yourself if you think this trademark is not valid. It's as iron-clad as they come. "Illustrator" doesn't mean anything to graphics people but "Adobe Illustrator", and when they hear "KIllustrator" the first thing they'll think of is also "Adobe Illustrator". This is simple infringement, and I'm completely behind Adobe in their actions.
I do not understand the fixation people have with "found in the dictionary". Tons of trademarks are found in the dictionary, and that doesn't make them any less valid. You mention Windows yourself.
A trademark is legally protected a word or symbol which is associated with a specific company or product within a particular context. "id" is a word found in the dictionary (the fruedian subconscious). But when used in the context of first-person shooters, it's obviously talking about id software, the makers of Doom. Apple with respect to computers is obviously in the same boat -- a simple word which nobody in their right mind doesn't associate with Apple Computers in that context. And can you really tell me that when you hear of a drawing program named Illustrator or even KIllustrator, you don't think of Adobe?
Hershey absolutely could have trademarked the word "Kiss" as it relates to chocolate confections. Evidently they didn't, and the word fell into common usage w.r.t. chocolate and is so no longer trademarkable. Their loss. Although, the foil packaging and little bit of paper sticking out *are* trademarked, incidentally.
"Game" and "Boy" are both found in the dictionary, but I'd be behind Nintendo every inch of the way if some company released something called "Game Cool Boy" and they got their asses sued. Being in the dictionary does not in any way mean that a word cannot be a valid trademark.
First, Adobe *has* to do this. I realize most/.ers don't understand IP law past "information wants to be free!", but trademarks have to be defended in order to remain valid.
If Adobe allowed KIllustrator to exist as a product and didn't do anything about it, Microsoft could (for instance) release a product called MS Illustrator. Adobe wouldn't be able to do anything about it -- they didn't fight KIllustrator, what possible objection could they have to MS Illustrator? They would very likely lose their trademark if they knowingly allowed a clearly similar product to use such a similar name. I doubt very many of you would take Microsoft's side in that fight, so why do you all take KOffice's side? Oh, right, open source guys should be able to do whatever the hell they want and all big companies are evil. Silly me, I forgot.
Second, I keep seeing people say you shouldn't be able to trademark simple words. Okay, "Windows" is a simple word. So you don't think Microsoft should be able to fight a piece of software called "KWindows"? Probably not. How about "Doom"? Another software. Should id software just blithely accept it if some Linux geek writes a first-person shooter called "KDoom"?
Folks, "Illustrator" is a graphics package by Adobe. The name "KIllustrator" was almost certainly chosen *because* of the name "Illustrator", not just as a coincidence. The fact that it's an open-source project does not grant it legal immunity, and it doesn't excuse such shameless and unethical trademark violation. Yes, that's right -- I consider it unethical for the authors of this program to have blatantly copied the name of a successful graphics package. How can you defend that?
Ummm... excuse me? Not sure which country we're in here, but there is no such thing as "reserving" copyright. You also do not have to protect your copyright or lose it, as with trademarks.
All works (literature, art, software, etc.) created in the US are automatically copyrighted. Done deal. You don't have to do anything else. Now, for greater security, you can *register* your copyright by officially filing it, and this gives you a far stronger claim on it when you find yourself in court, but legally there's no difference (it's just a lot easier to defend a registered copyright).
"Fair use" is part of copyright law, which grants certain rights to those other than the holder of the copyright. You can specifically do things like quote short passages from books and the like, make backup copies, and so forth.
...until C goes the way of the dodo. Let's face it, buffer overflows are pretty darned specific to C/C++ coding styles.
Languages which make it easier to use variable-sized buffers are a lot less subject to this problem, and Java (for example) is quite literally immune to buffer overflow exploits. C# will also be immune to such problems short of using the unsafe keyword.
(Naturally, when I say "immune" I'm referring to the facts that A) no real programmers use fixed-size buffers in these languages, and B) even if they did they would be unable to write past the end of the array)
(If there are any nuclear engineers in the audience, please feel free to correct me as this is from memory)
Ordinary nuclear reactors are fission reactors -- they split heavy nuclei into two lighter nuclei and a bit of energy. The most common fissionable material is Uranium-235, which as you might expect is extremely radioactive, and the "nuclear ash" (the lighter elements which result from fission) are also typically radioactive.
Nuclear fusion is the opposite process -- combining lighter nuclei into heavier ones. The sun produces its energy by fusing four hydrogen nuclei (otherwise known as protons) into a single helium nucleus (otherwise known as alpha particles: two protons and two neutrons). The four constituent protons are just a tad heavier than an alpha particle, and the extra mass is turned into energy.
Nuclear fusion in the lab (which *has* been done before, many times) doesn't follow the exact same process. It typically uses deuterium and tritium, which are hydrogen-2 (a proton and a neutron) and hydrogen-3 (a proton and two neutrons), respectively. Tritium is radioactive.
So while nuclear fusion doesn't have to involve radioactive substances (as evidenced by solar fusion), so far I don't think anybody has gotten away from them. Admittedly, though, fusion will still be infinitely cleaner than fission once somebody manages to generate a useful amount of power from it.
Seriously, you're asking *Slashdot*, which rather by definition contains a ridiculous number of C & Linux zealots, whether Java is an ideal teaching language?
That's a lot like conducting a poll of Bush's popularity at the Democratic Party Headquarters.
Judging from most the comments above, I don't think the average/.er has the slightest comprehension of what's out in the "real world" -- Java's not useful for "the real world"?!? Does anybody actually realize how much server-side Java code is out there?
Arguments about its utility as a teaching language are fine, but anyone claiming you can't get a job with Java skills hasn't taken a peek at the want ads lately.
I'm surprised to see the comment that the OLED displays were less than impressive... is this just unrealistic expectations (LCDs are very mature, OLEDs are still in diapers) or a sign that LCDs may be around longer than everybody wants?
Just got my GameBoy Advance today, and as with everybody else I'm disappointed with the very dim screen. I figure Nintendo will probably release an OLED version in a few years, which would be great -- *if* these problems with OLEDs get worked out.
First things first -- I ran a BBS starting at the age of twelve. It had many, many thousands of adult pictures on it. I had my first 'net access when I was thirteen; this was before the web, but there was still plenty of pr0n to be found.
Now, I saw a whole bunch of stuff that probably should have warped my fragile little mind, and I was way too young for most of it. But despite that I've developed into a reasonably normal adult; I'm happily married, I have a healthy attitude towards women and sex -- I'm unscarred by the early porn exposure.
I've thought about this issue, of what to do when I have kids and need to worry about this sort of thing. I'm leaning towards the side of (once they reach twelve or so) giving them unrestricted net access and trusting them to be every bit as immature as I was, but learn a lot about life in the process.
Sounds weird, I know -- allowing my kids to be exposed to the evils of the net!! Well, everybody I know who didn't see pr0n on the net saw their older sibling's porno tapes (or whatever) at aoubt the same age I was, and I'm not convinced that shielding them from pornography really protects them in any way.
The basic question I asked myself is: how many people do I know that weren't exposed to pr0n and other evils at a young age? Well, nobody that I've asked. I first saw hardcore porn at about the age of ten, my wife was eleven or twelve, and all of my friends were similarly young.
And of those people, how many turned out the worse for it? Tough to tell, I know, because we all saw it, but I certainly don't feel screwed up by the experience. Maybe it's just part of growing up.
I know, I know, there are pedophiles and all sorts of other nasties out there -- true enough, but they're not all on the net. Casual conversation with a child will easily reveal any suspicious online "friendships", and I'm not convinced they're in any more danger online than off.
I'm certainly not saying what you should or should not do with your stepdaughter, but give some serious thought to how many people you know who had unfiltered net access at that age who grew up the worse for it.
My dream of life-size pr0n can now be fulfilled...
Seriously, though, if you need a 61" display just get a projector. This will only find use in places where projectors aren't practical (kiosks and the like).
"...makes it ideal for mid-sized conference room...", yeah right. All of my company's conference rooms have projectors, and I'm damn sure they were a lot cheaper.
Pretty monitor, of course, but the price is going to be otherworldly.
Did you guys catch that the ISS was tracked *by hand*? Admittedly, only about twenty frames out of a 50MB AVI actually included the ISS, but hey that's still pretty amazing.
It can be tough enough (as an amateur, at least) to find and track a planet when you already know its precise coordinates. Finding the ISS by hand, I'd imagine, takes some impressive cojones.
Slashdot Mirror
We use swappable drive bays at work. We have a single computer with a dozen hard drives -- each one contains a different test environment (Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinME, Chinese, Korean, etc.)
This is (to me) a lot better than using System Commander, as it's much easier to be 100% that your system is completely plain-vanilla and any weirdness can be directly attributed to your software. It's also a lot smaller form-factor than a room full of systems...
--- egomaniac
Funny, but I haven't heard the common man complaining about the internet being unreliable and needing big corporations to step in and save it. I use the internet every day and very seldom (nowadays at least) have any trouble whatsoever.
The LAST THING I want is more commercial control of the internet's core infrastructure, and I imagine most of you agree. (Disclaimer: I work at a big internet company, and nobody here's been complaining about it either). Yet this article makes it sound like businesses are up in arms about it. Does anyone else out there have that experience? Is your business complaining about the anarchistic 'net?
I have a strong feeling this is just FUD being spread by telecom companies who want a bigger piece of the pie -- can you imagine more corporate control somehow bringing costs *down*?
--- egomaniac
Uhhhh ... no I'm not. One of the factors is guaranteed to be less than or equal to the square root. We're only trying to find that one -- once you've found that number, you've found both of them. The other one is the quotient of the division, and the fact that it is an integer shows you that you've just found the factors. *No shit* one of the numbers will be bigger than the square root -- given that the number will never be a perfect square (since we choose two different primes) this is absolutely guaranteed.
Did you actually read my message? If you did, please read it again. My whole point was how dumb a brute force algorithm was -- I sincerely hope you didn't think that I was suggesting that taking far longer than the lifespan of the universe to solve the problem was reasonable.
Please define "trivial", 'cause I don't think we're using the same definition of it.
I don't know how many primes there are below 10^617, but here's a hint: it's a LOT. A lot a lot. I don't know what the ratio of primes to nonprimes if, but let's just assume that 1 in 1 trillion numbers up to that level is prime (and I imagine that's conservative). 1 trillion is 1,000,000,000,000, or 10^12. So that reduces our number of primes down to 10^605. That's still a 605-digit number of them. Say it's only 1 in 100 quadrillion numbers -- still 10^600 primes.
So in order to solve the problem, you just attempt to divide the big number by each of the primes, and when you get an integral result, you stop. In fact, you only have use primes up to the square root of the number. The square root of 10^600 is 10^300. Assume you have a super-duper fast machine which can divide such an insanely huge number in just, say, 10 clock cycles, and it runs at 10GHz. That's a billion checks per second (10^9) -- really fast, huh?
So let's figure out how long our super-fast machine would take to crack this code using your method. 10^300 checks, divided by 10^9 checks per second, gives you 10^291 seconds. There are approximately 31,557,600 seconds in a year, or 3.15 * 10^7. 10^291 / (3.15 * 10^7) = 3.17 * 10^283. That's 31.7 million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million years.
I'm glad to know, however, that I can now file this problem away in my "trivial" category.
Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn't get too optimistic without further details.
Consider the way the electron gun works -- you essentially have a pretty powerful (relatively speaking) stream of electrons hitting each phosphor for a very very short period of time, and then the phosphor glows for a sixtieth of a second or so.
Basically, the IBM design replaces the single gun with a matrix of them, which sounds like a win -- except that now the energy you were pumping into a single electron gun is spread out among 1.92 million of them (1600x1200 screen). Making each gun as strong as the original but "always on" would cause the monitor to suck up 1.92 million times as much energy, assuming equal efficiency. Naturally if the gun is always on it wouldn't need to be anywhere near as powerful as the original, but I'd bet that 1/1,920,000 of a normal gun's power probably isn't enough.
In any case, to keep the power consumption of the monitor reasonable, there appear to be only three options: A) dramatically reduce the power of the guns (by a factor of almost two million), B) "flicker" them, firing only for very brief periods, or C) some combination of the above.
I'd bet that (C) is most likely: that the guns will be weaker and fire in bursts. I could be totally wrong, of course, as I don't actually know anything about the technology they're using -- but it seems like a reasonable assumption. So anyway, chances are (at least until further information proves me wrong) there will still be a refresh rate. Of course, it might be a really really fast refresh rate (say 1000Hz) which would be just as good as always on, but I'd say wait until more details surface before getting excited.
Tempting as it might be to go after the virus writers when something like this happens, the real problem is the buggy insecure code which lets it happen in the first place.
I'm not just picking on Microsoft - open-source projects have had their fair share of security holes as well.
But the fact is that Outlook, ISS, and various other products didn't even have security as an afterthought, it was just no thought at all. The charge shouldn't be "kill the virus writers", it should be "stop buying unsecure software".
After all, if you left your front door open for a week, and someone made off with your stereo, I'd argue that you had it coming. I'm not sure viruses are any different -- we just need to secure our damned software.
That's funny. I live in San Jose, one of the largest cities in the country, and given the high technophile rate here I'd expect a good digital cable adoption rate (everybody I know has it, at least).
Our AT&T digital cable is great. No artifacts, no stutters, great color, great sound. Must be something other than just the number of people using it which is causing your lousy service.
The scary part is that technology is all anyone ever talks about with respect to this movie. It's all about how great the effects are and how realistic the humans look, but the story line (IMHO) is crap.
This reminds me of Lionhead's Black & White: a ton of very talented people get together, create some awesome technology for technology's sake, endlesslu talk about how great the technology is, and when you view the final product it turns out that they've apparently worked very hard to leech every ounce of fun out of it. Expect this film to absolutely tank after the first week.
I should first say that I'm totally in favor of this and think it's a really cool idea.
However, I can already hear the privacy advocates screaming "big brother". People freaked out about serial numbers embedded in processors, after all -- can you really imagine that nobody's going to complain about companies implementing technology to track them wherever they go?
I hope not, but this just seems like exactly the sort of thing privacy nuts latch on to.
No, I just want to live in a world where we can respect one anothers' property.
Something that most Slashdotters don't seem particularly good at, I might add (how many Napster fans are there in the audience? How many still use it now that you can't trade copyrighted songs? Thought so.)
"If they wanted GAIM, they should have registered that as well"
So I should be able to create a cookie called, say, Nilli Wafers, and market them under the brand Nabisci, because Nabisco didn't register these particular variations on their trademarks? Envision a world in which I could get away with this, and tell me that unscrupulous people wouldn't take ridiculous advantage of it. Would you rather have that instead?
And, nobody ever said anything about HAL/IBM. See Slippery Slope logical fallacy.
I'm sorry, I know this is Anti-Open-Source (TM), but I think that GAIM is clearly trademark infringement. Adding one letter does not mean you're safe, any more than a clone of Windows named GWindows would be reasonable.
... This sentence might just have a *tad* more impact if, in fact, you actually had to register a trademark in order to claim it. Trademarks are like copyrights -- the fact that a trademark has not been officially registered in no way means it isn't valid. Lawyer-speak at its best.
The whole point is consumer confusion, and you've got to remember that the average consumer probably can't name the president. The average user wouldn't find it too touch to miss one letter when the products do the exact same thing.
I love the line "Also, we note that the Gaim software was released almost two years before your client submitted its application for registration of the "AIM" mark"
In any case, this isn't 'fighting the good fight'. This is wasting time, money, and effort that could be much better spent accomplishing something actually useful. Change the damned name and move on.
Hasn't anyone considered the possibility that this is a hoax? I've read four or five articles saying this exact same thing for the past few weeks, and not one has been more specific than "according to our sources".
"According to our sources"? What, like our government would make a silly request like this and then refuse to talk to the press about it? Which branch of the government or military made the request? Which committee debated doing this? Who was ultimately responsible for the decision? What experts solemnly related their opinions that DVD technology is somehow dangerous? Are DVD-ROM drives banned in China? How about DVD players?
The complete lack of such details in any of these articles makes me very, very suspicious of their veracity. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of people were actually dumb enough to think that Saddam Hussein was somehow interested in PS2 technology for military use -- haven't we heard this story before?
You've got to be kidding me -- as if they could build a dojo in the ISS? Every space vehicle I've ever seen is severely space-constrained, and I can't imagine the ISS being much better.
The idea of fitting a film crew, sound crew, director, actors, costumes, and props up there, not to mention the expense of training the humans for outer space and launching them (and dealing with a few days of severe nausea), makes the idea of filming something akin to the Matrix in space absolutely laughable. This will *not* get used for Hollywood-style movies.
Not really sure what you would use it for, actually. Discovery Channel specials? That seems a lot more believable.
I'd strongly disagree with that. Nobody, nowhere, writes optimal code. What good does it do you if you can prove that language FooBar has the best optimal implementation of problem X, but nobody in the real world actually writes it that way? (Hint: none at all)
I think the important metric is not that the programs are optimal, but that they are representative of what a programmer of average skill in a particular language would produce. After all, one of the benefits of a good language is how easy it is to use -- and we presume that this ease of use will be reflected by better-written benchmarks. It's a lot easier, for instance, to write good code in Java or Smalltalk than in assembly, so why shouldn't those languages be able to show some benefit from that in a test like this?
Of course, ease of use is impossible to quantify in a test like this, but I'd argue that shooting for optimal (i.e. written by somebody far more skilled than an average programmer) will seriously distort one's expectations of real-world usability of these languages.
Did you read my whole comment, or stop after the first paragraph? Just wondering.
You're deluding yourself if you think this trademark is not valid. It's as iron-clad as they come. "Illustrator" doesn't mean anything to graphics people but "Adobe Illustrator", and when they hear "KIllustrator" the first thing they'll think of is also "Adobe Illustrator". This is simple infringement, and I'm completely behind Adobe in their actions.
*sigh*
I do not understand the fixation people have with "found in the dictionary". Tons of trademarks are found in the dictionary, and that doesn't make them any less valid. You mention Windows yourself.
A trademark is legally protected a word or symbol which is associated with a specific company or product within a particular context. "id" is a word found in the dictionary (the fruedian subconscious). But when used in the context of first-person shooters, it's obviously talking about id software, the makers of Doom. Apple with respect to computers is obviously in the same boat -- a simple word which nobody in their right mind doesn't associate with Apple Computers in that context. And can you really tell me that when you hear of a drawing program named Illustrator or even KIllustrator, you don't think of Adobe?
Hershey absolutely could have trademarked the word "Kiss" as it relates to chocolate confections. Evidently they didn't, and the word fell into common usage w.r.t. chocolate and is so no longer trademarkable. Their loss. Although, the foil packaging and little bit of paper sticking out *are* trademarked, incidentally.
"Game" and "Boy" are both found in the dictionary, but I'd be behind Nintendo every inch of the way if some company released something called "Game Cool Boy" and they got their asses sued. Being in the dictionary does not in any way mean that a word cannot be a valid trademark.
First, Adobe *has* to do this. I realize most /.ers don't understand IP law past "information wants to be free!", but trademarks have to be defended in order to remain valid.
If Adobe allowed KIllustrator to exist as a product and didn't do anything about it, Microsoft could (for instance) release a product called MS Illustrator. Adobe wouldn't be able to do anything about it -- they didn't fight KIllustrator, what possible objection could they have to MS Illustrator? They would very likely lose their trademark if they knowingly allowed a clearly similar product to use such a similar name. I doubt very many of you would take Microsoft's side in that fight, so why do you all take KOffice's side? Oh, right, open source guys should be able to do whatever the hell they want and all big companies are evil. Silly me, I forgot.
Second, I keep seeing people say you shouldn't be able to trademark simple words. Okay, "Windows" is a simple word. So you don't think Microsoft should be able to fight a piece of software called "KWindows"? Probably not. How about "Doom"? Another software. Should id software just blithely accept it if some Linux geek writes a first-person shooter called "KDoom"?
Folks, "Illustrator" is a graphics package by Adobe. The name "KIllustrator" was almost certainly chosen *because* of the name "Illustrator", not just as a coincidence. The fact that it's an open-source project does not grant it legal immunity, and it doesn't excuse such shameless and unethical trademark violation. Yes, that's right -- I consider it unethical for the authors of this program to have blatantly copied the name of a successful graphics package. How can you defend that?
Ummm ... excuse me? Not sure which country we're in here, but there is no such thing as "reserving" copyright. You also do not have to protect your copyright or lose it, as with trademarks.
All works (literature, art, software, etc.) created in the US are automatically copyrighted. Done deal. You don't have to do anything else. Now, for greater security, you can *register* your copyright by officially filing it, and this gives you a far stronger claim on it when you find yourself in court, but legally there's no difference (it's just a lot easier to defend a registered copyright).
"Fair use" is part of copyright law, which grants certain rights to those other than the holder of the copyright. You can specifically do things like quote short passages from books and the like, make backup copies, and so forth.
...until C goes the way of the dodo. Let's face it, buffer overflows are pretty darned specific to C/C++ coding styles.
Languages which make it easier to use variable-sized buffers are a lot less subject to this problem, and Java (for example) is quite literally immune to buffer overflow exploits. C# will also be immune to such problems short of using the unsafe keyword.
(Naturally, when I say "immune" I'm referring to the facts that A) no real programmers use fixed-size buffers in these languages, and B) even if they did they would be unable to write past the end of the array)
(If there are any nuclear engineers in the audience, please feel free to correct me as this is from memory)
Ordinary nuclear reactors are fission reactors -- they split heavy nuclei into two lighter nuclei and a bit of energy. The most common fissionable material is Uranium-235, which as you might expect is extremely radioactive, and the "nuclear ash" (the lighter elements which result from fission) are also typically radioactive.
Nuclear fusion is the opposite process -- combining lighter nuclei into heavier ones. The sun produces its energy by fusing four hydrogen nuclei (otherwise known as protons) into a single helium nucleus (otherwise known as alpha particles: two protons and two neutrons). The four constituent protons are just a tad heavier than an alpha particle, and the extra mass is turned into energy.
Nuclear fusion in the lab (which *has* been done before, many times) doesn't follow the exact same process. It typically uses deuterium and tritium, which are hydrogen-2 (a proton and a neutron) and hydrogen-3 (a proton and two neutrons), respectively. Tritium is radioactive.
So while nuclear fusion doesn't have to involve radioactive substances (as evidenced by solar fusion), so far I don't think anybody has gotten away from them. Admittedly, though, fusion will still be infinitely cleaner than fission once somebody manages to generate a useful amount of power from it.
(disclaimer: I am a professional Java developer)
/.er has the slightest comprehension of what's out in the "real world" -- Java's not useful for "the real world"?!? Does anybody actually realize how much server-side Java code is out there?
Seriously, you're asking *Slashdot*, which rather by definition contains a ridiculous number of C & Linux zealots, whether Java is an ideal teaching language?
That's a lot like conducting a poll of Bush's popularity at the Democratic Party Headquarters.
Judging from most the comments above, I don't think the average
Arguments about its utility as a teaching language are fine, but anyone claiming you can't get a job with Java skills hasn't taken a peek at the want ads lately.
I'm surprised to see the comment that the OLED displays were less than impressive ... is this just unrealistic expectations (LCDs are very mature, OLEDs are still in diapers) or a sign that LCDs may be around longer than everybody wants?
Just got my GameBoy Advance today, and as with everybody else I'm disappointed with the very dim screen. I figure Nintendo will probably release an OLED version in a few years, which would be great -- *if* these problems with OLEDs get worked out.
First things first -- I ran a BBS starting at the age of twelve. It had many, many thousands of adult pictures on it. I had my first 'net access when I was thirteen; this was before the web, but there was still plenty of pr0n to be found.
Now, I saw a whole bunch of stuff that probably should have warped my fragile little mind, and I was way too young for most of it. But despite that I've developed into a reasonably normal adult; I'm happily married, I have a healthy attitude towards women and sex -- I'm unscarred by the early porn exposure.
I've thought about this issue, of what to do when I have kids and need to worry about this sort of thing. I'm leaning towards the side of (once they reach twelve or so) giving them unrestricted net access and trusting them to be every bit as immature as I was, but learn a lot about life in the process.
Sounds weird, I know -- allowing my kids to be exposed to the evils of the net!! Well, everybody I know who didn't see pr0n on the net saw their older sibling's porno tapes (or whatever) at aoubt the same age I was, and I'm not convinced that shielding them from pornography really protects them in any way.
The basic question I asked myself is: how many people do I know that weren't exposed to pr0n and other evils at a young age? Well, nobody that I've asked. I first saw hardcore porn at about the age of ten, my wife was eleven or twelve, and all of my friends were similarly young.
And of those people, how many turned out the worse for it? Tough to tell, I know, because we all saw it, but I certainly don't feel screwed up by the experience. Maybe it's just part of growing up.
I know, I know, there are pedophiles and all sorts of other nasties out there -- true enough, but they're not all on the net. Casual conversation with a child will easily reveal any suspicious online "friendships", and I'm not convinced they're in any more danger online than off.
I'm certainly not saying what you should or should not do with your stepdaughter, but give some serious thought to how many people you know who had unfiltered net access at that age who grew up the worse for it.
My dream of life-size pr0n can now be fulfilled...
Seriously, though, if you need a 61" display just get a projector. This will only find use in places where projectors aren't practical (kiosks and the like).
"...makes it ideal for mid-sized conference room...", yeah right. All of my company's conference rooms have projectors, and I'm damn sure they were a lot cheaper.
Pretty monitor, of course, but the price is going to be otherworldly.
Did you guys catch that the ISS was tracked *by hand*? Admittedly, only about twenty frames out of a 50MB AVI actually included the ISS, but hey that's still pretty amazing.
It can be tough enough (as an amateur, at least) to find and track a planet when you already know its precise coordinates. Finding the ISS by hand, I'd imagine, takes some impressive cojones.