Thousands of Iraqis have died ( 100,000 died in the first war)
That was the initial estimate during the war. Afterwards, the number was found to be a couple of orders of magnitude lower. Iraqi units that were bombed had far fewer soldiers than had been estimated, and they were smart enough to mostly stay away from where the bombs were dropping.
NAT isn't outlawed by these bills, but any VPN technology is, as well as any access to proxies via SSL, since that 'conceals' the souce/destination
I disagree. Every packet that comes out of my computer on a VPN or SSL connection has both the source and destination unconcealed. They are both in the IP header.
Sprint does not fully support SMS. Instead, they have something they call "Short Mail" for two-way text messaging.
The phones can receive SMS (except they call it "notifications", because that's what they use to notify you of new Short Mail and new regular mail).
"Short Mail" is very similar to SMS, except it is web-based. To compose a Short Mail message, you have to use the browser, and the message is uploaded to the server, and then an SMS notice is sent. The recipient has to use the browser to read the message.
The web stuff is slow enough to make this annoying. It's almost useless when you just want to dash off a quick message.
Given that most cellphones now have Caller ID, ignoring a unrecognized number should be easy
That can still be very inconvenient. For example, my cell phone is usually in my pocket. I can get it out reasonably safetly while driving, but it is annoying. (Yes...I know talking while driving is bad...but I want to at least check the number, and if it is someone that might be important, I can find a safe place and call back).
Many phones nowadays let you associate different ring tones for different people in your phonebook, so you can use that to help.
My father once suggested a paintball system wherein everyone carried a paint-ball gun. If you drive like an asshole, people nail you. If you get over a certain number of hits, and a cop sees you, you get a ticket
Actually, you father is probably misremembering an old Gallagher bit, where he suggested the same thing, except with little dart guns. When a cop sees you with too many darts, you get a ticket for being stupid.
The odd thing about MySQL is I've never seen anyone give a good reason for reason using it in the first place.
As far as I have been able to tell, every reason one might give for using MySQL also applies to PostgreSQL.
On the other hand, there are several things PostgreSQL can do that MySQL cannot.
So...starting from not having any database, and deciding which to use on that first project, I don't see why anyone picks MySQL over PostgreSQL. They seem to be about equally difficult to set up and learn, so why not go with the one that will be able to handle more? Even if you don't need that more now, why not, since it is no extra effort, be prepared if a project comes along that does need those extra things?
True, but compilations of facts have been determined to be copyrightable (such as each individual phonebook)
What kind of phone books? The white pages, for example, are NOT copyrightable. This was decided by the Supreme Court, in Fiest vs. Rural Telephone.
The court agreed with the lower courts that putting together a phone book was a lot of work, but decided that the Constitution requires that there be some creativity, and "take the names of everyone with a phone and put them in alphabetical order" doesn't count.
[...]unless AOL bundles the appliance with its 1e6 hours free cds
I love how the number of hours keeps going up on AOL free offers. Read the fine print, though...all the hours are only good for one month. The current offers are enough hours that you'd have to be online basically 24/7 to use them.
This means that they could actually offer 1e6 hours (although for the AOL crowd to understand it, calling it a million hours would be better), and it wouldn't cost them anything more than they are now offering.
Yeah...I know I should just go look at the source, but I'm lazy. Since Linux names IDE drives hda, hdb, etc., anyone know offhand what it does if you have more than 26? What comes after hdz?
If buying in bulk was really all there was to the price, I wouldn't be able to build a machine cheaper then Dell. As a general rule, I normally can (I haven't tried lately so maybe I can't)
It depends. I'll assume you buy parts from reputable dealers. I've seen great deals from dealers with the lowest prices at Pricewatch, but then have looked them up at Reseller Ratings, and found that they sucked. So, let's use prices from dealers that rate well, so we actually get our parts, and if we have any problems, can exchange them in less than six months and two lawsuits.:-)
Under that assumption, you can beat, or come close, to the prices you get when you simply go to Dell and configure a good medium to high end system.
On the other hand, Dell usually has various coupons and specials that you don't find just going to the site. If you spend a while watching places like Techbargains, and pounce on the specials, you can't come anywhere near Dell's prices by building your own--even if you throw sanity to the wind, and buy from the cheapest lowball places you can find for parts.
For example, they had their best 19" LCD for something like $600 with the right coupons and rebates for a couple days. A comparable LCD from most places was $1200, and could be found for $900 on sale at the time.
Of course, this assumes starting from nothing. When you take into account that most of us building our own salvage many parts from the system we are replacing, the long term cost of building your own might be less.
Quote: They won't be evaluating your grasp of the facts. It would be a curious job interview indeed if they didn't evaluate your grasp of facts
Read the article again. The imaginary situation (which is just to put the thing in context, not an essential part of the article's argument) is that this is one of the final interviews for the candidates on the short list. At that stage, they've already evaluated your grasp of the facts, and you've passed.
Phil Zimmerman was quoted as saying: "I can't think at one way to make this technology available to everyone, without also making it available to criminals. I thought about it a lot. This has been the focus of the debate in the '90s: many cryptographers tried to think about the way to make this technology available to good people without making it available to bad people, but nobody could find a solution"
A good start would be make it so that good people don't NEED to use it.
For example, I've used gpg to encrypt email concerning romantic feelings. There shouldn't be any need to encrypt such email, because reading about other people's romantic feelings should be boring, because it is so common.
However, the nature of my romantic feelings in that case did not align 100% with what society considers to be normal, and there are some people who would see that as a perfectly good reason to deny me a job, or housing, or service.
So, I encrypted.
In a truly free society, where society accepts the freedom includes the freedom to be different without penalty, then most of us would not bother with encryption. At most, we'd use digital signatures to verify identity, and those things that we did need to encrypt would be encrypted to protect against theft (e.g., credit card numbers when buying online), and in those cases, we'd have no problem with key escrow.
Be careful what you wish for. It's excellent handling of Windoze apps is part of what killed OS/2. Developers: "Why port it when it can run the windoze version?"
I don't believe that this is actually true. Win95 had excellent Win3.x compatibility, but developers nevertheless rushed to develop Win95 software. Why would Win3.x compatibility in OS/2 cause developers to forego native development, but not have the same effect on Win95?
I believe that what really killed OS/2 was IBM's attitude toward developers. Microsoft made it trivial to get started in Win95 development. Hell, you could go into Egghead and buy an MSDN subscription and all the tools you needed.
Compare to OS/2, where you had to apply to IBM for permission to develop, and buy an expensive development kit (at least, to officially develop).
I believe it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote of his experiences at a trade show, where he went to the MS booth, and asked what he had to do to develop for the upcoming Win95, and they handed him, on the spot, a development kit. At the IBM booth, he asked what he had to do to develop for OS/2 (a system that was already for sale, unlike Win95, which was still in beta). Did they hand him a development kit? Nope. They handed an application. If they decided he was worthy, he'd be allowed to buy a development kit.
I think that is the reason OS/2 development never took off.
Note! I'm not saying for-pay developer programs necessarily kill a platform. Apple used to have a for-pay program, but it was a joy, because of the astounding support. You sent any question off to DTS, and they would quickly have a good engineer, with full access to the source and the developers, answer it. I was having trouble with interrupt handling in a device driver, and they send me the detailed comments from the ROM source code for the interrupt handler, which explained exactly what was going on.
With Apple DTS, the feeling I had as a developer was that I was dealing with my peers at Apple, who wanted to cooperate with me to make something great. With IBM, I always felt like an insignificant pawn in whatever they were doing.
Overly configuable interfaces may be a problem, in that it is confusing to deal with a lot of configuration options...but once you get them set up, that isn't a problem.
The problem on most open systems is inconsistency, because there are many different interfaces. For example, on my Linux system, I've noticed almost half a dozen different file open dialogs. Any one of them would be OK (sure...some are better than others, but I could get used to any of them), but having all of them is a problem.
This situation arises because the user interface decisions are made by the developers of each individual application (either directly, or indirectly by which X toolkit they choose to use).
Here's what I want. I want to decide which file dialog I like, which scroll bar behaviour I like, what dohickeys are on the titles bars of windows, etc., and I want every program on the system to obey that decision when I use it, unless I specifically ask or give permission for that program to do something else.
Why not use/dev/random or another pseudo-random number generator instead of/dev/zero, or at least do one round of zero's, one round of random data, and repeat say... 5-10 times?:)
Well, one problem with that method is that the data can still be recovered.
Read this paper for more information.
Anyone out there hear of this new free OS called Lineux or something?
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux is specific to the x86, and will probably never be ported to any other architecture, so it's probably not going to amount to much in the long run.
When Apple releases Copland, we'll all want to get PPCs.
Before television was popular, there were many radio dramas. I'm way too young to have heard them originally, but I've heard rebroadcasts of some, and what stands out is how good science fiction can be on audio.
Consider something like the the bar with the aliens in "Star Wars". In an audio drama, all you have to do is have a few words by the narrator (something about a typical seedy spaceport dive, with a band of aliens playing exotic instruments), and then some simple sound effects, and the listener gets an image of the place.
Not "the" image...but "an" image...which is better, because everyone gets the image of the perfect seedy spaceport dive for them.
In a movie, all we get is the director's image...and unless they spend a lot on costumes and effects, it's a cheesy image at that.
When you don't have to spend most of your budget on effects, you can spend more on story. Many classic SF stories that we'll probably never seen done well on the screen were done in the 50's on radio.
Q: You've had your email address forged on spam, subjecting your mail server to many many many bounce messages and complaints. What are you going to do now?
A: I'm going to slashdot my web server!
Re:What is an example that can't run in parallel?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
Am I missing anything important here?
I believe the problem is that there are many different ways to reach each position usually, and so you end up with a LOT of duplication. The obvious way to adapt a chess algorithm to N processors is to list all the moves available at the start of the search, and give 1/N of those to each processor. That gives much less speedup than you'd like to see.
I think this has been discussed on usenet in the rec.games.chess.* groups, so googling should turn up information from people who actually know this stuff (I'm just going from memory here!)
That said, can someone venture an explanation why Go is so difficult to program?
For most of the game, there are many more moves available than in chess, and it usually takes many more moves for a bad move to have an obvious affect.
In Chess, a positional mistake can usually be converted to a material loss in 10 or 15 moves. In Go, a positional mistake can take much much longer to lead to a territory loss.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the initial estimate during the war. Afterwards, the number was found to be a couple of orders of magnitude lower. Iraqi units that were bombed had far fewer soldiers than had been estimated, and they were smart enough to mostly stay away from where the bombs were dropping.
I disagree. Every packet that comes out of my computer on a VPN or SSL connection has both the source and destination unconcealed. They are both in the IP header.
The phones can receive SMS (except they call it "notifications", because that's what they use to notify you of new Short Mail and new regular mail).
"Short Mail" is very similar to SMS, except it is web-based. To compose a Short Mail message, you have to use the browser, and the message is uploaded to the server, and then an SMS notice is sent. The recipient has to use the browser to read the message.
The web stuff is slow enough to make this annoying. It's almost useless when you just want to dash off a quick message.
That can still be very inconvenient. For example, my cell phone is usually in my pocket. I can get it out reasonably safetly while driving, but it is annoying. (Yes...I know talking while driving is bad...but I want to at least check the number, and if it is someone that might be important, I can find a safe place and call back).
Many phones nowadays let you associate different ring tones for different people in your phonebook, so you can use that to help.
Actually, you father is probably misremembering an old Gallagher bit, where he suggested the same thing, except with little dart guns. When a cop sees you with too many darts, you get a ticket for being stupid.
As far as I have been able to tell, every reason one might give for using MySQL also applies to PostgreSQL.
On the other hand, there are several things PostgreSQL can do that MySQL cannot.
So...starting from not having any database, and deciding which to use on that first project, I don't see why anyone picks MySQL over PostgreSQL. They seem to be about equally difficult to set up and learn, so why not go with the one that will be able to handle more? Even if you don't need that more now, why not, since it is no extra effort, be prepared if a project comes along that does need those extra things?
What kind of phone books? The white pages, for example, are NOT copyrightable. This was decided by the Supreme Court, in Fiest vs. Rural Telephone.
The court agreed with the lower courts that putting together a phone book was a lot of work, but decided that the Constitution requires that there be some creativity, and "take the names of everyone with a phone and put them in alphabetical order" doesn't count.
I love how the number of hours keeps going up on AOL free offers. Read the fine print, though...all the hours are only good for one month. The current offers are enough hours that you'd have to be online basically 24/7 to use them.
This means that they could actually offer 1e6 hours (although for the AOL crowd to understand it, calling it a million hours would be better), and it wouldn't cost them anything more than they are now offering.
Yeah...I know I should just go look at the source, but I'm lazy. Since Linux names IDE drives hda, hdb, etc., anyone know offhand what it does if you have more than 26? What comes after hdz?
It depends. I'll assume you buy parts from reputable dealers. I've seen great deals from dealers with the lowest prices at Pricewatch, but then have looked them up at Reseller Ratings, and found that they sucked. So, let's use prices from dealers that rate well, so we actually get our parts, and if we have any problems, can exchange them in less than six months and two lawsuits. :-)
Under that assumption, you can beat, or come close, to the prices you get when you simply go to Dell and configure a good medium to high end system.
On the other hand, Dell usually has various coupons and specials that you don't find just going to the site. If you spend a while watching places like Techbargains, and pounce on the specials, you can't come anywhere near Dell's prices by building your own--even if you throw sanity to the wind, and buy from the cheapest lowball places you can find for parts.
For example, they had their best 19" LCD for something like $600 with the right coupons and rebates for a couple days. A comparable LCD from most places was $1200, and could be found for $900 on sale at the time.
Of course, this assumes starting from nothing. When you take into account that most of us building our own salvage many parts from the system we are replacing, the long term cost of building your own might be less.
Read the article again. The imaginary situation (which is just to put the thing in context, not an essential part of the article's argument) is that this is one of the final interviews for the candidates on the short list. At that stage, they've already evaluated your grasp of the facts, and you've passed.
A good start would be make it so that good people don't NEED to use it.
For example, I've used gpg to encrypt email concerning romantic feelings. There shouldn't be any need to encrypt such email, because reading about other people's romantic feelings should be boring, because it is so common.
However, the nature of my romantic feelings in that case did not align 100% with what society considers to be normal, and there are some people who would see that as a perfectly good reason to deny me a job, or housing, or service.
So, I encrypted.
In a truly free society, where society accepts the freedom includes the freedom to be different without penalty, then most of us would not bother with encryption. At most, we'd use digital signatures to verify identity, and those things that we did need to encrypt would be encrypted to protect against theft (e.g., credit card numbers when buying online), and in those cases, we'd have no problem with key escrow.
I don't believe that this is actually true. Win95 had excellent Win3.x compatibility, but developers nevertheless rushed to develop Win95 software. Why would Win3.x compatibility in OS/2 cause developers to forego native development, but not have the same effect on Win95?
I believe that what really killed OS/2 was IBM's attitude toward developers. Microsoft made it trivial to get started in Win95 development. Hell, you could go into Egghead and buy an MSDN subscription and all the tools you needed.
Compare to OS/2, where you had to apply to IBM for permission to develop, and buy an expensive development kit (at least, to officially develop).
I believe it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote of his experiences at a trade show, where he went to the MS booth, and asked what he had to do to develop for the upcoming Win95, and they handed him, on the spot, a development kit. At the IBM booth, he asked what he had to do to develop for OS/2 (a system that was already for sale, unlike Win95, which was still in beta). Did they hand him a development kit? Nope. They handed an application. If they decided he was worthy, he'd be allowed to buy a development kit.
I think that is the reason OS/2 development never took off.
Note! I'm not saying for-pay developer programs necessarily kill a platform. Apple used to have a for-pay program, but it was a joy, because of the astounding support. You sent any question off to DTS, and they would quickly have a good engineer, with full access to the source and the developers, answer it. I was having trouble with interrupt handling in a device driver, and they send me the detailed comments from the ROM source code for the interrupt handler, which explained exactly what was going on.
With Apple DTS, the feeling I had as a developer was that I was dealing with my peers at Apple, who wanted to cooperate with me to make something great. With IBM, I always felt like an insignificant pawn in whatever they were doing.
The problem on most open systems is inconsistency, because there are many different interfaces. For example, on my Linux system, I've noticed almost half a dozen different file open dialogs. Any one of them would be OK (sure...some are better than others, but I could get used to any of them), but having all of them is a problem.
This situation arises because the user interface decisions are made by the developers of each individual application (either directly, or indirectly by which X toolkit they choose to use).
Here's what I want. I want to decide which file dialog I like, which scroll bar behaviour I like, what dohickeys are on the titles bars of windows, etc., and I want every program on the system to obey that decision when I use it, unless I specifically ask or give permission for that program to do something else.
Well, one problem with that method is that the data can still be recovered. Read this paper for more information.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux is specific to the x86, and will probably never be ported to any other architecture, so it's probably not going to amount to much in the long run.
When Apple releases Copland, we'll all want to get PPCs.
Atomic bomb ends war with Japan!
Slashdot editors discover that they can avoid duplicates by posting stories that predate slashdot!
Consider something like the the bar with the aliens in "Star Wars". In an audio drama, all you have to do is have a few words by the narrator (something about a typical seedy spaceport dive, with a band of aliens playing exotic instruments), and then some simple sound effects, and the listener gets an image of the place.
Not "the" image...but "an" image...which is better, because everyone gets the image of the perfect seedy spaceport dive for them.
In a movie, all we get is the director's image...and unless they spend a lot on costumes and effects, it's a cheesy image at that.
When you don't have to spend most of your budget on effects, you can spend more on story. Many classic SF stories that we'll probably never seen done well on the screen were done in the 50's on radio.
Finally, audio works great in the car.
Unless he sends actual spam, or is on an ISP that supports spamming, he wouldn't end up on the SPEWS list in the first place.
A: I'm going to slashdot my web server!
I believe the problem is that there are many different ways to reach each position usually, and so you end up with a LOT of duplication. The obvious way to adapt a chess algorithm to N processors is to list all the moves available at the start of the search, and give 1/N of those to each processor. That gives much less speedup than you'd like to see.
I think this has been discussed on usenet in the rec.games.chess.* groups, so googling should turn up information from people who actually know this stuff (I'm just going from memory here!)
Well, it's not a whole book--just a quarter of one, but I thought Stand By Me was actually better than the original story (The Body).
For most of the game, there are many more moves available than in chess, and it usually takes many more moves for a bad move to have an obvious affect.
In Chess, a positional mistake can usually be converted to a material loss in 10 or 15 moves. In Go, a positional mistake can take much much longer to lead to a territory loss.
No, because you would then be violating the GPL. Since you only have a binary, you cannot satisfy the GPL's source requirements.