While this is all quite suspicious and Slashdotters love the very idea of a conspiracy, I'm not yet in Spybot's camp here. First of all, one week to investigate and respond to an issue is way too short for a company as large as Symantec. Who does Spybot think they are to demand a one week response. Even the Department of Justice couldn't make such a demand, and if the DoJ did Slashdotters would be all up in arms over the evilness of it all.
It's particular funny considering how slow Spybot is when it comes to investigating things. I've seen them literally take years to remove a false positive that everyone else fixed in a couple months.
I'd like to see someplace like Spyware Warrior do a blind review of all the current anti-spyware products. I suspect Spybot would fare considerably worse in such a test than it does when the reviewer knows what they are reviewing.
The very fact that Symantec is in the group means they are just a sham. Symantec's Norton Antivirus classifies Spybot S&D as a virus (HUH?). Then, when they were forced to admit it wasn't, the excuse becamse "Norton Ghost won't work if Spybot S&D is installed" (HUH?). Just the usual tactic to push competitors (especially free competitors) out of the market
Spybot does exactly the same thing. I've seen them classify competing programs as malware, and not correct their mistake when informed of it. If you want a good free anti-spyware tool, use Microsoft's. It's way better than Spybot when it comes to accuracy, has a better interface, is not plagued with the screwups to updates that Spybot regularly experiences, and they do a much better job at correcting things when they do make a mistake.
(Even better...get Linux or a Mac!)
Spybot deserves accolades for being a pioneer, and at one time, when the spyware problem was much smaller, it was the best out there. Those days are past.
No, it's the fault of the people distributing it. Since GPH is distributing the hardware, which contains the binaries, GPH is responsible for making available the sources that correspond to the binaries they are distributing.
In this case, they probably do, but there is a case that falls through the cracks that I bet we are going to see before long, considering the increasing use of embedded Linux. That case is this:
(1) Vendor A makes a hardware device that contains Linux. A sells this device to other vendors, shipping them the device and a CD with the source code.
(2) Vendor B buys these hardware devices from A, and customizes them by adding application software and data. B does not modify or copy the software that came from A. E.g., Linux from A is in ROM, and B is adding their stuff to hard disk, or Linux is on the hard disk, and B is just adding a user account to run their application, or something like that. B sells these devices to end users.
Vendor A is making copies of GPL'ed software, and needs to satisfy GPL. They satisfy GPL by including the source code CD.
Vendor B is not making copies, but just redistributing the copies they obtained from A. This redistribution falls under the first sale doctrine of copyright law, and does not require the permission of the copyright holder. B is under no GPL obligation whatsoever with regard to the end user who buys B's device.
Net result: no one is obligated to provide the end user with source for the GPL'ed code in the device! B is off the hook because they were never on the hook, as they have not done anything that requires permission. A is off the hook because they accompanied each binary they distributed with the source code.
Can't thet cut to the chase, how many dead pixels can i get stuck with?
People have reported returning monitors that had dead pixels, but not enough to fall under the dead pixel policy allowance, under Dell's general "money back if you aren't satisfied for any reason policy".
I haven't had a chance to try this, as my 24" was perfect.
(1) There are a lot more users getting $7.50 than there are lawyers getting millions. From the point of view of discouraging similar behavior in the future, that $7.50 to users is going to be a bigger stick than than the fees of a few lawyers.
(2) Lawyers who handle these kinds of suits put up a lot of money up front, out of their own pockets. If the suit doesn't get certified as a class action, of if they lose, they are out that money. That happens a lot. In general, class action lawyers do OK, but not a lot better than other lawyers. You just never hear much about all the cases where they don't get anything.
If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care. Is it really news that they are using a new technology?
It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else, and so it is useful to know what technology they use. Think back to shortly after The Simpsons became a hit, and then every other network tried to jump in with animated prime-time shows, and pretty much all failed. This is discussed on one of The Simpsons DVD commentaries, and Matt Groening and the others explain what these other shows did wrong. The big thing was trying to use too few people. These other shows would hire one or two big name writers, and expect them to write a whole season. On The Simpsons, on the other hand, they had a dozen writers, with most writers only working on one episode for a season. They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two. So, it is not surprising that these other shows sucked...how can one or two writers and one or two directors produce year after year (or even one year) of quality on a weekly TV series?
But look at South Park. They do all the things that for those other shows were fatal mistakes. Most episodes are written by Trey Parker, or Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or by those two and Pam Brady. And besides writing, Parker and Stone direct. They write original music, and perform it. And they do a large number of the voices.
And on top of that, they do it on an insane schedule, sometimes not finishing a script until days before the episode must air.
Yet, it works. They produce a great show.
To do this requires very good technology. They aren't sending stuff off to Korea, to come back weeks or months later. They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series, and so they need technology that is very fast and very reliable, much more so than any other series needs.
There are a lot of flaws that are countined multiple times in that count. For example, If a flaw is reported, and then 3 updates giving more details are reported, it is counted as 4 flaws in those counts. Here are the counts after a rough attempt at eliminating this overcounting:
If you use a filesystem and kernel that supports ACLs, users can do everything they should need in almost all circumstances.
There are only a couple of situations I've run into where I've needed more, such as applications that need to bind to a priviledged port, or where I've needed to run a cron job that needed more than 1024 file descriptors and so had to make it setuid root. (Setting the number of file descriptors up for a user via/etc/security/limits.conf doesn't apply to that user's cron jobs).
You cannot legislate away theft. If you want to curb it, you have to remove the economic incentive to steal
Uhm...that's what legislation does. It reduces the economic incentive by raising the cost of theft. Surely you don't think the direct cost to buy something is the only economic cost, do you?
For the foreseeable future, any life on the moon will be in a spacesuit that is completely sealed, or inside a building or ship that is completely sealed. So, would toxic moondust be a problem?
I suppose one might have to be careful when opening an airlock, lest moondust enter the airlock and then spread to the inside of the ship, but without an atmosphere, any dust blown up will settle quickly, so a simple rule of not opening an airlock right after anything nearby explodes should be sufficient.
Or is the risk that it will get on the outside of suits, and be hard to clean off, and so will be carried in?
If you run these queries right after each other then it would only be natural for the second to execute faster as the table has already been loaded into memory on the DB. I've interchanged '123' with 123 in queries that go against integer fields with no performance difference whatsoever. Maybe there's a penalty if you run that type of query against a text/char field, but text is always supposed to be single quoted.
Use a bigint field. The problem is that the query planner sees 123 as an int, and so when planning who to handle id=123, it sees it has an int (123) and a bigint index (the index on id), and those are different types, so it can't use the index. Result: it does a seq scan.
When you say '123', then when it is parsing the query, before running the planner, it sees that it has to convert that from a string to a number, and it looks at the type of id, sees it is bigint, and so convert the '123' to a bigint 123. The query planner then sees it can use the index, and goes much faster.
You can also get the fast query by writing it likt this:
This sort of technical reason is why MySQL is still considered toy in my mind
I don't see how the inability of the person who started this thread branch to read documentation is a technical problem with MySQL. COUNT(*) works correctly in MySQL, giving an accuate count of the number of items.
This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015. It's going to be DVD right up to the holocubes.
A significant chunk of DVD sales is for TV series, which are usually sold by the season on multi-disc sets. HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or both will be quite popular regardless of whether people have TVs that can display HDTV, simply because they'll be able to get a whole season of a show on far fewer discs.
I agree on the mouse. At work, I've switched to a keyboard with an integrated trackpad and ditched my mouse. At home, I still use a mouse, but it is the Apple mouse that came with my PowerMac, instead of the Logitech I had used for years. My wrists have been much much much better since these two changes.
I'm not sure why the Apple mouse seems to make such a difference. My speculation is that because it is basically one big button, there is much more freedom of hand position while using it, and so it is easier to keep the hand in a position that isn't too stressful or putting pressure on the wrong place.
I know a lot of gamers who multitask incredibly poorly when playing games. There's a "zone" they get into, where distractions just don't get through - telephone, household pets, noise outside, a bomb in the next room, etc., none of it gets noticed.
Many modern games require a high degree of multitasking within the game. I think that is where any gamer advantage at multitasking comes from. Ignoring the telephone, pets, bombs, etc., while gaming is not a failure of multitasking. It is simply ignoring distractions.
Example of multitasking in games. I have a Healer in the Midgard realm in Dark Age of Camelot. In a group, I might have to be monitoring the health and situation of up to 7 other people, prioritize their healing needs, pick what healing spells to use on them, and heal them. Meanwhile, if any extra monsters show up, I have to mesmerize them if the rest of the group is not ready to immediately deal with them. I've also got a spell that slows monster attack speed for 20 seconds. I need to be using that and renewing it on monsters that are taking a long time to kill. I've got a limited amount of power for all this, so I have to keep close watch on my power level.
The same goes for players of many other classes, in DAoC and in other MMORPGs.
I wonder if prohibition actually created crime, as the article states, or simply provided new opportunities for criminals? That is, did prohibition cause people who would have otherwise been law-abiding citizens to go into crime, or did people who would have been into extortion, prostitution, gambling, etc., simply add alchohol distribution to their list of activities?
If M1 and M2 are both shoeboxes they have equal function Fd(|velocity|) and so at any later time as they are both subject to the same accelleration they will have the same speed and drag values
They have equal Fd, but that's equal force, not equal acceleration. The acceleration is force divided by mass, so that equal Fd results in unequal acceleration. Fd/M1 for the first box and Fd/M2 for the second box.
I think you meant to say that the atmospheric drag depends on surface characteristics and shape, so a feather and a ball bearing drop at different speeds, but I don't see how two shoeboxes with the same profile should drop at different speeds on account of the internal mass!
The acceleration of an object of mass M subject to force F is F/M. (These should all be vectors, but lets just do forces along one axis, so we can just deal with scalars).
Consider two objects of the same size and shape, but different masses, say M1 and M2, falling in an atmosphere. There are two forces acting on each: gravity and drag, which are acting in opposite direction.
The drag on the two objects is the same, since that just depends on surface characteristic and shape, not mass. Let's call this force Fd.
The gravity force on the first object is g*M1, and on the second it is g*M2.
So, if there were no drag, they would fall at the same speed, because they would be subject to the same acceleration. The heavier object feels more force from gravity, but has more inertia, and these exactly cancel out.
With drag, however, the force on the first object is g*M1-Fd, and on the second object it is g*M2-Fd. Divide by mass to get acceleration.
The acceleration on the first object is g-Fd/M1. The acceleration on the second object is g-Fd/M2.
Note that the net acceleration is larger for the more massive object. As the mass goes up, the acceleraton gets closer to g.
Going back to the forces, consider g*M-Fd. Drag is not a function of mass, but it is a function of velocity. As velocity goes up, so does drag. Terminal velocity will be the point where g*M = Fd. Note that for a more massive object, this will be at a higher velocity.
These effects do not take much height to see. You really can see them with a shoebox, dropped from 5 or 6 feet. Or, if you don't mind a bit of a mess, and want to make the difference really really obvious, you can use a water balloon and an air balloon, inflated to the same size.
ma=GMm/r^2 so an object as light a a hard drive will hit the deck as fast as an object as light as a hard-drive-shaped block of uranium
That would be right, if we were on the Moon. On Earth, though, we have an atmosphere. In an atmosphere, when you drop two objects of the same size and shape, the heavier one falls faster. Try this. Take two shoe boxes, one empty, and one full of bricks. Drop them both from 6 feet, or whatever you can comfortably reach. The brick-filled shoe box wins easily.
The reason for this is that the drag force does not depend on the mass, but the acceleration does. So, two objects of same size and shape, moving at a given velocity, have the same drag force, but the acceleration caused by that force, a=F/m, is smaller for the heavier object.
Basically, gravity scales. For a more massive object, you get more force from gravity, which exactly cancels out the reduction in acceleration you'd get by having more mass, and the result is constant acceleration independent of mass. But for other forces, they don't scale with mass like that, and so acceleration is a function of mass.
You can also see this coasting a bike downhill. A heavy person pulls ahead of a light person.
Slashdot Mirror
"Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service."
Why does the parent poster claim that Microsoft is a monopoly yet Apple isn't?
Maybe because the parent poster knows that you don't look at dictionary.com to find out what a legal term means?
It's particular funny considering how slow Spybot is when it comes to investigating things. I've seen them literally take years to remove a false positive that everyone else fixed in a couple months.
I'd like to see someplace like Spyware Warrior do a blind review of all the current anti-spyware products. I suspect Spybot would fare considerably worse in such a test than it does when the reviewer knows what they are reviewing.
Spybot does exactly the same thing. I've seen them classify competing programs as malware, and not correct their mistake when informed of it. If you want a good free anti-spyware tool, use Microsoft's. It's way better than Spybot when it comes to accuracy, has a better interface, is not plagued with the screwups to updates that Spybot regularly experiences, and they do a much better job at correcting things when they do make a mistake.
(Even better...get Linux or a Mac!)
Spybot deserves accolades for being a pioneer, and at one time, when the spyware problem was much smaller, it was the best out there. Those days are past.
In this case, they probably do, but there is a case that falls through the cracks that I bet we are going to see before long, considering the increasing use of embedded Linux. That case is this:
(1) Vendor A makes a hardware device that contains Linux. A sells this device to other vendors, shipping them the device and a CD with the source code.
(2) Vendor B buys these hardware devices from A, and customizes them by adding application software and data. B does not modify or copy the software that came from A. E.g., Linux from A is in ROM, and B is adding their stuff to hard disk, or Linux is on the hard disk, and B is just adding a user account to run their application, or something like that. B sells these devices to end users.
Vendor A is making copies of GPL'ed software, and needs to satisfy GPL. They satisfy GPL by including the source code CD.
Vendor B is not making copies, but just redistributing the copies they obtained from A. This redistribution falls under the first sale doctrine of copyright law, and does not require the permission of the copyright holder. B is under no GPL obligation whatsoever with regard to the end user who buys B's device.
Net result: no one is obligated to provide the end user with source for the GPL'ed code in the device! B is off the hook because they were never on the hook, as they have not done anything that requires permission. A is off the hook because they accompanied each binary they distributed with the source code.
People have reported returning monitors that had dead pixels, but not enough to fall under the dead pixel policy allowance, under Dell's general "money back if you aren't satisfied for any reason policy".
I haven't had a chance to try this, as my 24" was perfect.
(2) Lawyers who handle these kinds of suits put up a lot of money up front, out of their own pockets. If the suit doesn't get certified as a class action, of if they lose, they are out that money. That happens a lot. In general, class action lawyers do OK, but not a lot better than other lawyers. You just never hear much about all the cases where they don't get anything.
It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else, and so it is useful to know what technology they use. Think back to shortly after The Simpsons became a hit, and then every other network tried to jump in with animated prime-time shows, and pretty much all failed. This is discussed on one of The Simpsons DVD commentaries, and Matt Groening and the others explain what these other shows did wrong. The big thing was trying to use too few people. These other shows would hire one or two big name writers, and expect them to write a whole season. On The Simpsons, on the other hand, they had a dozen writers, with most writers only working on one episode for a season. They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two. So, it is not surprising that these other shows sucked...how can one or two writers and one or two directors produce year after year (or even one year) of quality on a weekly TV series?
But look at South Park. They do all the things that for those other shows were fatal mistakes. Most episodes are written by Trey Parker, or Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or by those two and Pam Brady. And besides writing, Parker and Stone direct. They write original music, and perform it. And they do a large number of the voices.
And on top of that, they do it on an insane schedule, sometimes not finishing a script until days before the episode must air.
Yet, it works. They produce a great show.
To do this requires very good technology. They aren't sending stuff off to Korea, to come back weeks or months later. They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series, and so they need technology that is very fast and very reliable, much more so than any other series needs.
They switched to computers a few seasons ago.
There are only a couple of situations I've run into where I've needed more, such as applications that need to bind to a priviledged port, or where I've needed to run a cron job that needed more than 1024 file descriptors and so had to make it setuid root. (Setting the number of file descriptors up for a user via /etc/security/limits.conf doesn't apply to that user's cron jobs).
Uhm...that's what legislation does. It reduces the economic incentive by raising the cost of theft. Surely you don't think the direct cost to buy something is the only economic cost, do you?
I suppose one might have to be careful when opening an airlock, lest moondust enter the airlock and then spread to the inside of the ship, but without an atmosphere, any dust blown up will settle quickly, so a simple rule of not opening an airlock right after anything nearby explodes should be sufficient.
Or is the risk that it will get on the outside of suits, and be hard to clean off, and so will be carried in?
Looks like they fixed it in 8.
Use a bigint field. The problem is that the query planner sees 123 as an int, and so when planning who to handle id=123, it sees it has an int (123) and a bigint index (the index on id), and those are different types, so it can't use the index. Result: it does a seq scan.
When you say '123', then when it is parsing the query, before running the planner, it sees that it has to convert that from a string to a number, and it looks at the type of id, sees it is bigint, and so convert the '123' to a bigint 123. The query planner then sees it can use the index, and goes much faster.
You can also get the fast query by writing it likt this:
select * from tbl where id = 123::int8
PostgreSQL has its own problems. I have a simple table, with a couple bigint columns. Consider these two statements:
1. select * from tbl where id = 123;
2. select * from tbl where id = '123';
The second is nearly three orders of magnitude faster.
People have complained about this annoying gotcha for years.
I don't see how the inability of the person who started this thread branch to read documentation is a technical problem with MySQL. COUNT(*) works correctly in MySQL, giving an accuate count of the number of items.
What security problems does IE for the Mac have?
A significant chunk of DVD sales is for TV series, which are usually sold by the season on multi-disc sets. HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or both will be quite popular regardless of whether people have TVs that can display HDTV, simply because they'll be able to get a whole season of a show on far fewer discs.
I'm not sure why the Apple mouse seems to make such a difference. My speculation is that because it is basically one big button, there is much more freedom of hand position while using it, and so it is easier to keep the hand in a position that isn't too stressful or putting pressure on the wrong place.
Many modern games require a high degree of multitasking within the game. I think that is where any gamer advantage at multitasking comes from. Ignoring the telephone, pets, bombs, etc., while gaming is not a failure of multitasking. It is simply ignoring distractions.
Example of multitasking in games. I have a Healer in the Midgard realm in Dark Age of Camelot. In a group, I might have to be monitoring the health and situation of up to 7 other people, prioritize their healing needs, pick what healing spells to use on them, and heal them. Meanwhile, if any extra monsters show up, I have to mesmerize them if the rest of the group is not ready to immediately deal with them. I've also got a spell that slows monster attack speed for 20 seconds. I need to be using that and renewing it on monsters that are taking a long time to kill. I've got a limited amount of power for all this, so I have to keep close watch on my power level.
The same goes for players of many other classes, in DAoC and in other MMORPGs.
I wonder if prohibition actually created crime, as the article states, or simply provided new opportunities for criminals? That is, did prohibition cause people who would have otherwise been law-abiding citizens to go into crime, or did people who would have been into extortion, prostitution, gambling, etc., simply add alchohol distribution to their list of activities?
16 MB is not a "monster" amount of RAM anywhere except hard drives. Why are they lagging so far behind everything else in this area?
They have equal Fd, but that's equal force, not equal acceleration. The acceleration is force divided by mass, so that equal Fd results in unequal acceleration. Fd/M1 for the first box and Fd/M2 for the second box.
The acceleration of an object of mass M subject to force F is F/M. (These should all be vectors, but lets just do forces along one axis, so we can just deal with scalars).
Consider two objects of the same size and shape, but different masses, say M1 and M2, falling in an atmosphere. There are two forces acting on each: gravity and drag, which are acting in opposite direction.
The drag on the two objects is the same, since that just depends on surface characteristic and shape, not mass. Let's call this force Fd.
The gravity force on the first object is g*M1, and on the second it is g*M2.
So, if there were no drag, they would fall at the same speed, because they would be subject to the same acceleration. The heavier object feels more force from gravity, but has more inertia, and these exactly cancel out.
With drag, however, the force on the first object is g*M1-Fd, and on the second object it is g*M2-Fd. Divide by mass to get acceleration.
The acceleration on the first object is g-Fd/M1. The acceleration on the second object is g-Fd/M2.
Note that the net acceleration is larger for the more massive object. As the mass goes up, the acceleraton gets closer to g.
Going back to the forces, consider g*M-Fd. Drag is not a function of mass, but it is a function of velocity. As velocity goes up, so does drag. Terminal velocity will be the point where g*M = Fd. Note that for a more massive object, this will be at a higher velocity.
These effects do not take much height to see. You really can see them with a shoebox, dropped from 5 or 6 feet. Or, if you don't mind a bit of a mess, and want to make the difference really really obvious, you can use a water balloon and an air balloon, inflated to the same size.
That would be right, if we were on the Moon. On Earth, though, we have an atmosphere. In an atmosphere, when you drop two objects of the same size and shape, the heavier one falls faster. Try this. Take two shoe boxes, one empty, and one full of bricks. Drop them both from 6 feet, or whatever you can comfortably reach. The brick-filled shoe box wins easily.
The reason for this is that the drag force does not depend on the mass, but the acceleration does. So, two objects of same size and shape, moving at a given velocity, have the same drag force, but the acceleration caused by that force, a=F/m, is smaller for the heavier object.
Basically, gravity scales. For a more massive object, you get more force from gravity, which exactly cancels out the reduction in acceleration you'd get by having more mass, and the result is constant acceleration independent of mass. But for other forces, they don't scale with mass like that, and so acceleration is a function of mass.
You can also see this coasting a bike downhill. A heavy person pulls ahead of a light person.