Boot times, and persistence
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 1
Current memory seems pretty persistant to me. I switched cell phones, and I tried to wipe the old one by taking out the battery, so I would not have to go through all the entries in the phone book and delete them by hand. After a week, I put the battery back in and turned it on...and everything was still there. Next try was a month. Still no data lost. I gave up then and deleted everything by hand.
As far as fast boot times go...one of Spider Robinson's characters had an interesting observation. He spent a thousand dollars getting a hard disk for his Mac (which is about right for the time the story was written) so he wouldn't have to wait for a boot floppy once a day. Yet, he spent 10 minutes every day fiddling with the water controls in the shower to get the temperature right. For far less than a thousand dollars, one could build a system to automatically adjust the water temperature in the shower, but we don't. Why does a slow booting computer bother us so much, but all these other things that waste more time don't?
Suppose you want to do, say, web services, starting from complete ignorance.
On Windows, you buy one development tool (Visual Studio.NET) and one or two books to learn how to use it. There are special "learning" editions of VS available for about a hundred bucks that will get you started quite nicely.
On Linux with Java, you first have to figure out what you need. There are a zillion projects for enterprise-level Java stuff. There are a zillion books, and no two seem to cover the same thing, so you can't compare them. I'm still not clear on what I actually need to install on my Linux system to get servelets working...which is OK, because I'm not clear on what I'd want servelets for, anyway...they are just another part of this big lumpy mess that is J2EE.
When talking about development costs, the tools and documentation are probably more important thant the technology, and Microsoft is very good at tools and documentation.
Sometimes I get the impression that people on slashdot just talk about P2P theoretically, rather than actually trying it.
Install a P2P system that lets you see what people are searching for, and guess what...something like 99% of it is indeed commercial music and porn of questionable legality.
While CW may have dubious value any more for "real world" work, it's still in use by a lot of Hams worldwide, and is one of the best ways to do QRP (low power) work. It takes minimal bandwidth and power to communicate with CW
Considering that one of the main justifications for amateur radio is to provide a means of communication when other systems fail, doesn't this mean that keeping a minimal code requirements is good? In an emergency, with limited power, and perhaps cobbled together equipment, something you can send Morse code with is the easiest to get working.
Note in all those pictures, he is standing in front of the same rack.
Two things odd about this
on
New Heinlein Novel
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if this is a hoax? There are two things that strike me as odd about it.
First, they say this novel was written before Heinlein's first published SF short story. It's been a while since I've read any Heinlein biographical material, but I thought the story (no pun intended) was that Heinlein read about a contest for amateur stories, wrote one, decided to submit it to a magazine instead, was accepted, and basically said "Whoa...how long has THIS easy way to make money been around?" and was off and running.
For him to have an unpublished novel from before this would mean that he was trying to be a writer before he did that first short. Furthermore, it would mean he was trying to start with novels, which is much harder. It was far better to break into the field with short stories in the magazines than to start with novels (especially since there really wasn't a market for SF outside the magazines). If Heinlein was actually planning on being a writer, I find it very hard to believe that he would not have researched the field.
Second, the novel being unpublishable in its day because of racy content does not strike me as very Heinlein-like. Sure, some people consider Heinlein's later works to be overly concerned with sex, but that at least made sense, both in the context of the times, and in the context of Heinlein's personal situation at the time. It would make no sense for him to be starting out with a racy novel--one so racy that it could not be published. (And, back to the first point, I have a hard time believing Heinlein would not know exactly what the limits were, and stay on the publishable side...he does not strike me as the kind of man who would go to the effort of writing an unpublishable novel)
Repo men can do amazing things. I worked once at a small Unix workstation company in the early 80's (Callan Data Systems, if anyone remembers them). We were having some financial trouble, and our blueprint machine was repossesed. That thing was huge...about the size of a small piano (acoustic, not digital).
It was in a central room, which had one door and no windows. The door opened to a hallway. From that hallway, you could either go out past the receptionist, past one of the company founder's office, to get out the front door, or you could go the other way, past my office, and the offices of a couple other programmers.
We noticed the machine missing at noon. It had last been used at 11am. Between that time, the receptionist had been on duty, the founder had been at work in his office with the door open, and four programmers had been at work with their doors open, facing the hallway.
There had been the usual bathroom breaks, trips to the printer, and stuff like that, but still...it seems like it would require amazing timing to find an opportunity in there to sneak the thing out...and there was no vantage point outside the building from which one could see that the route would be clear.
WTF? eBay doesn't have any problem with auctions selling currency, items, and characters in MMORPGs. (eBay will pull such auctions if they are against the games rules, but eBay doesn't have a problem with them otherwise).
How is this any different? The items in those auctions are delivered electronically, and don't physically exist.
Compare to TNT/TBS/TNN/WB. How's Enterprise doing these days?
Yeah, let's look at Enterprise. One possible clunker in a franchise that has spawned five live action series, an animated series, several movies, and zillions of books. How much money has Star Trek as a whole made through syndication?
How much is "Joe Millionaire" going to make for FOX in syndication? Firefly had serious Star Trek-like potential.
You talk about FOX executives buisness skills, but skilled businessmen would have either not bought Firefly in the first place, or would have treated it better. It makes no business sense to pay to produce a show and then air it in such a way as to ensure that it would not survive. They just threw that money away.
Anytime there's an article that whines about deep linking, a few dozen people post replies saying that the company could use the referer header to block all such requests. Now that a company is actually doing it, it's suddenly a bad idea
What does deep linking have to do with this? The story says it is all linking from a particular site that is being blocked.
The average consumer sends email from home through their ISP, and has no problem whatsoever getting their mail out despite SPEWS and other blacklists.
If you are advanced enough in your internet needs to be finding a hosting company to host a domain with a website and email server, you are sophisticated enough to know about Google.
how the hell is anyone to research these things? there's no servershost out there with some reseller page. You google and you don't get some big "servershost sucks" page, you've just become another victim of the spam wars.
Look up the hosting company on Google Groups. If there are a lot of hits in abuse.sightings, and a lot of discussion of them in abuse.email, and these don't appear to be mostly old things that were handled properly, keep looking.
Trouble is when you're not a spammer and you're hosting at an ISP and the class C you're on gets listed
Yup, whole class C's eventually get listed, because spam-supporting ISPs like to respond to spam complaints (if they don't ignore them completely) by moving the spammer to a different IP address.
If they block anything, they should only block the IP's that cause the problem, not large netblocks
Blacklisting just the actual spam-sending IP addresses was tried for a long time, and it does not work. It just turns into a big game of whack-a-mole.
My co-located server has been blacklisted by SPEWS for months now. And it's only because of a spammer elsewhere on my two-providers-up-the-chain regional ISP. And the spammer is on a different C-class entirely
SPEWS starts out with a listing of JUST the IP address that is spamming. It gets wider only if abuse reports are repeatedly ignored. It takes many steps to get as wide as you are describing. I suspect you are greatly understating the magnitude of the spam flowing from your ISP or the upstream providers.
I can't email several friends
Email them from somewhere else and ask them to whitelist you. If they are on an ISP that doesn't support whitelists, then either they have to move, or you have to move.
Maybe there's something wrong with me, but it certailnly doesn't seem that way to me
No, there's nothing actually wrong with you. You just are completely clueless.:-)
If you use the internet, you are affected by spam, because pretty much every ISP is spending significant time and money dealing with it. That gets passed on to you. Find the interview with Barry Shein, which I think was the subject of a Slashdot story a few months ago.
Your cluelessness is also shown by mentioning hitting "D" a "few times a day". Try a few hundred times a day for many of us, and a few thousand times a day for those of us who have businesses with email contact and support addresses listed on our web sites. For businesses, that CAN'T whitelist everyone who might legitimately send mail, those spams can't just be quickly deleted...it is too easy to accidently delete customer mail if you do it quickly.
I don't quite understand, is it possible you could elaborate on this a little more?
There are two BSD licenses. The original BSD license had a clause that said that if you mentioned features of the software in ads, you had to mention that the code came from UCB. The current BSD license does not have this clause.
The FSF says that the original BSD license is not compatible with the GPL, because of this clause. Here is where FSF says this.
The license that Caldera used when they released some of the code Parens is talking about is very similar to the original BSD license. Here is that license.
If the FSF is correct about the advertising clause making such a license incompatible with the GPL, then it means that Linux does have a problem. When you mix code under the GPL and code that is under an incompatible license, you have to get special permission from the copyright owners of the GPL'ed code. You can't just take GPL'ed code and use it in such a mixed environment.
The Caldera license Parens cites as allowing the use of code in Linux does no such thing, according the FSF. It is similar to the original BSD license, which is NOT GPL-compatible, according to FSF, because of the advertising clause.
Perhaps these same programmers to which you refer are the ones who use "write-only-memory"
Say...anyone know if there is still a display case near the elevator in one of the basements of the EE building at Caltech that displays less-than-successful projects of the faculty and students? If so, does it still include Carver Mead's 4K write-only memory card (from back in the days when 4K was a lot of memory)? (No, it wasn't INTENDED to be write-only).
obviously reviews and the fact that a new 200 million dollar movie opened each weekend had nothing to do with it?
The only thing that is obvious is that you didn't read the story. Let's go through it slowly. Lately, the rate at which the attendence drops off for "bad" movies has gone way up. What used to take a week to happen, with just the bad reviews and new movies coming out each week, now happens in a day or two.
It is this that they are attributing to text messaging. Before, it took a certain amount of time for word of mouth to spread. Now it is happening much faster.
Especially considering that the Linux version of the code is marked "Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc."
That would explain the "register" variables. That keyword has been ignored by compilers for a long time, and so when you see it in code, it is almost always old code, copied from somewhere.
...it would be interesting to see how feasible it is to do all the 2D rendering using OpenGL
Isn't that what Blender does? They implement their GUI using OpenGL, drawing all the widgets themselves, so that their interface is the same on all platforms they are ported to.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as fast boot times go...one of Spider Robinson's characters had an interesting observation. He spent a thousand dollars getting a hard disk for his Mac (which is about right for the time the story was written) so he wouldn't have to wait for a boot floppy once a day. Yet, he spent 10 minutes every day fiddling with the water controls in the shower to get the temperature right. For far less than a thousand dollars, one could build a system to automatically adjust the water temperature in the shower, but we don't. Why does a slow booting computer bother us so much, but all these other things that waste more time don't?
On Windows, you buy one development tool (Visual Studio.NET) and one or two books to learn how to use it. There are special "learning" editions of VS available for about a hundred bucks that will get you started quite nicely.
On Linux with Java, you first have to figure out what you need. There are a zillion projects for enterprise-level Java stuff. There are a zillion books, and no two seem to cover the same thing, so you can't compare them. I'm still not clear on what I actually need to install on my Linux system to get servelets working...which is OK, because I'm not clear on what I'd want servelets for, anyway...they are just another part of this big lumpy mess that is J2EE.
When talking about development costs, the tools and documentation are probably more important thant the technology, and Microsoft is very good at tools and documentation.
Install a P2P system that lets you see what people are searching for, and guess what...something like 99% of it is indeed commercial music and porn of questionable legality.
It is pretty amazing to watch.
Considering that one of the main justifications for amateur radio is to provide a means of communication when other systems fail, doesn't this mean that keeping a minimal code requirements is good? In an emergency, with limited power, and perhaps cobbled together equipment, something you can send Morse code with is the easiest to get working.
Note in all those pictures, he is standing in front of the same rack.
First, they say this novel was written before Heinlein's first published SF short story. It's been a while since I've read any Heinlein biographical material, but I thought the story (no pun intended) was that Heinlein read about a contest for amateur stories, wrote one, decided to submit it to a magazine instead, was accepted, and basically said "Whoa...how long has THIS easy way to make money been around?" and was off and running.
For him to have an unpublished novel from before this would mean that he was trying to be a writer before he did that first short. Furthermore, it would mean he was trying to start with novels, which is much harder. It was far better to break into the field with short stories in the magazines than to start with novels (especially since there really wasn't a market for SF outside the magazines). If Heinlein was actually planning on being a writer, I find it very hard to believe that he would not have researched the field.
Second, the novel being unpublishable in its day because of racy content does not strike me as very Heinlein-like. Sure, some people consider Heinlein's later works to be overly concerned with sex, but that at least made sense, both in the context of the times, and in the context of Heinlein's personal situation at the time. It would make no sense for him to be starting out with a racy novel--one so racy that it could not be published. (And, back to the first point, I have a hard time believing Heinlein would not know exactly what the limits were, and stay on the publishable side...he does not strike me as the kind of man who would go to the effort of writing an unpublishable novel)
It was in a central room, which had one door and no windows. The door opened to a hallway. From that hallway, you could either go out past the receptionist, past one of the company founder's office, to get out the front door, or you could go the other way, past my office, and the offices of a couple other programmers.
We noticed the machine missing at noon. It had last been used at 11am. Between that time, the receptionist had been on duty, the founder had been at work in his office with the door open, and four programmers had been at work with their doors open, facing the hallway.
There had been the usual bathroom breaks, trips to the printer, and stuff like that, but still...it seems like it would require amazing timing to find an opportunity in there to sneak the thing out...and there was no vantage point outside the building from which one could see that the route would be clear.
How is this any different? The items in those auctions are delivered electronically, and don't physically exist.
Is "resnet" specific technology or software, or just a general term for a university network that the student residences are on?
Yeah, let's look at Enterprise. One possible clunker in a franchise that has spawned five live action series, an animated series, several movies, and zillions of books. How much money has Star Trek as a whole made through syndication?
How much is "Joe Millionaire" going to make for FOX in syndication? Firefly had serious Star Trek-like potential.
You talk about FOX executives buisness skills, but skilled businessmen would have either not bought Firefly in the first place, or would have treated it better. It makes no business sense to pay to produce a show and then air it in such a way as to ensure that it would not survive. They just threw that money away.
What does deep linking have to do with this? The story says it is all linking from a particular site that is being blocked.
Then you might find 86 F.3d 1447 interesting.
The average consumer sends email from home through their ISP, and has no problem whatsoever getting their mail out despite SPEWS and other blacklists.
If you are advanced enough in your internet needs to be finding a hosting company to host a domain with a website and email server, you are sophisticated enough to know about Google.
Look up the hosting company on Google Groups. If there are a lot of hits in abuse.sightings, and a lot of discussion of them in abuse.email, and these don't appear to be mostly old things that were handled properly, keep looking.
Yup, whole class C's eventually get listed, because spam-supporting ISPs like to respond to spam complaints (if they don't ignore them completely) by moving the spammer to a different IP address.
If they block anything, they should only block the IP's that cause the problem, not large netblocks
Blacklisting just the actual spam-sending IP addresses was tried for a long time, and it does not work. It just turns into a big game of whack-a-mole.
SPEWS starts out with a listing of JUST the IP address that is spamming. It gets wider only if abuse reports are repeatedly ignored. It takes many steps to get as wide as you are describing. I suspect you are greatly understating the magnitude of the spam flowing from your ISP or the upstream providers.
I can't email several friends
Email them from somewhere else and ask them to whitelist you. If they are on an ISP that doesn't support whitelists, then either they have to move, or you have to move.
No, there's nothing actually wrong with you. You just are completely clueless. :-)
If you use the internet, you are affected by spam, because pretty much every ISP is spending significant time and money dealing with it. That gets passed on to you. Find the interview with Barry Shein, which I think was the subject of a Slashdot story a few months ago.
Your cluelessness is also shown by mentioning hitting "D" a "few times a day". Try a few hundred times a day for many of us, and a few thousand times a day for those of us who have businesses with email contact and support addresses listed on our web sites. For businesses, that CAN'T whitelist everyone who might legitimately send mail, those spams can't just be quickly deleted...it is too easy to accidently delete customer mail if you do it quickly.
There are two BSD licenses. The original BSD license had a clause that said that if you mentioned features of the software in ads, you had to mention that the code came from UCB. The current BSD license does not have this clause.
The FSF says that the original BSD license is not compatible with the GPL, because of this clause. Here is where FSF says this.
The license that Caldera used when they released some of the code Parens is talking about is very similar to the original BSD license. Here is that license.
If the FSF is correct about the advertising clause making such a license incompatible with the GPL, then it means that Linux does have a problem. When you mix code under the GPL and code that is under an incompatible license, you have to get special permission from the copyright owners of the GPL'ed code. You can't just take GPL'ed code and use it in such a mixed environment.
The Caldera license Parens cites as allowing the use of code in Linux does no such thing, according the FSF. It is similar to the original BSD license, which is NOT GPL-compatible, according to FSF, because of the advertising clause.
That currency conversion is off by about 3 orders of magnitude.
Is this a new oxymoron?
Say...anyone know if there is still a display case near the elevator in one of the basements of the EE building at Caltech that displays less-than-successful projects of the faculty and students? If so, does it still include Carver Mead's 4K write-only memory card (from back in the days when 4K was a lot of memory)? (No, it wasn't INTENDED to be write-only).
The only thing that is obvious is that you didn't read the story. Let's go through it slowly. Lately, the rate at which the attendence drops off for "bad" movies has gone way up. What used to take a week to happen, with just the bad reviews and new movies coming out each week, now happens in a day or two.
It is this that they are attributing to text messaging. Before, it took a certain amount of time for word of mouth to spread. Now it is happening much faster.
That would explain the "register" variables. That keyword has been ignored by compilers for a long time, and so when you see it in code, it is almost always old code, copied from somewhere.
Isn't that what Blender does? They implement their GUI using OpenGL, drawing all the widgets themselves, so that their interface is the same on all platforms they are ported to.