It becomes completely non-weird if you stop thinking of it as a desktop machine. They have a test instrument which contains a processor. The processor is only as powerful as it has to be. Nothing surprising about it.
a central computer means in which plural blocks of information are stored at respectively corresponding locations, each of which locations is
designated by a predetermined address therein by means of which a block can be selected, each of said blocks comprising a first portion containing
information for display and a second portion containing information not for display but including the complete address for each of plural other blocks
of information;
In the html for a hyperlink, the extra linking info is first, and the "information for display" comes second. Not the other way 'round as they describe. Nyah nyah!:-P
Furthermore, it could go all sorts of places in RAM or on disk. And, a relative URL doesn't contain "the complete address".
Forget prior art. Charge the idiots with fraud for trying to get money based on this crap.
Whether or not this additude will harm the US in the long run remains to be seen. Mentioning India as a threat seems to be a stretch right now, they
have a pretty limited industrial base as far as I know.
The action in India is in programming, not hardware.
Indian has a unique combination of features that might allow it to become a "coding superpower". Its traditional culture and religion have a long history of abstract, written scholarship. The British made English a common second language. On the other hand, wages are not those of an industrialized country. Finally, it has a huge population, creating a "critical mass" of programmers within a single culture and legal system.
The fact that the author couldn't seem to tell hardware from software bugged me too. And, because of the differences between the two, his reference to Japan and the auto industry is bogus.
The whole Demming/Japan thing is about doing the same opperation in exactly the same way, time after time to produce the desired physical product. Sorry, but industrial CD production pretty much has this problem beat. And that's that's the only physical part of software "production". If you're doing exact repitition while coding, you're ether an idiot or you're paid by the line.
Whenever a programming task gets close to this level of repetition, someone writes a tool for it.
Nothing involving people is that simple. People try to think about what they do, but not all the time, not very clearly, and almost never with complete information. It's messy. In this case, the incomplete information ("There's a benign trojan, and this is what it looks like", or, "It can be ok to run random email attachments") would do far more damage than the code would do good.
The only way a plan like this could do more good than harm would be if it was completely secret. And in that case, the original poster would not have heard of it, and it wouldn't be discussed on Slashdot.;-)
What I really don't understand is why someone hasn't written a benign virus/trojan...
If the average user receives anything the the listed sender didn't mean to send, they shouldn't run it, ever, even if it asks nicely. It's way too easy for someone to rewrite the "benign" virus/trojan to do something evil.
This might, in an indirect way, be the reason Java has been slow to catch on on Linux. Linux has it's own traditional support for web aps in CGI, Perl, and C. These work just fine on the Linux box on the developer's desk, and on the Linux box in the server room.
However, most of corporate America's big servers run a commercial Unix, while most of their developer desktops still belong to Bill. The the real "write once, run anywhere" is therefore "write and compile here, deploy there." And since server side programming doesn't use AWT or Swing, this really does work.
What is it with the current trend to romanticising criminals and their lifestyles, no matter what they do? Sure, this man isn't exactly a serial rapist,
but there are other books out there which both allow criminals to attempt to justify and/or glorify what they did as well as profit from them. This
is a pretty sad indication of today's culture.
On the contrary, I think it's an indication of the success of our culture... that and the nature of a good story. The core of most stories is danger and conflict. But we've killed or driven off the dangerous animals. We've visited or looked down on every square inch of the planet. The continental US has not been invaded in living memeory. Roving bandits have no chance against radios. And a sane person's goal in any violent criminal encounter is simply to live long enough to call the police.
The world of the law abiding citizen just doesn't have as much adventure as it used to. Therefore, stories of "a man alone against his environment" are mostly about criminals.
We're not evil, just bored. And we know the difference between learning about something and doing it. (A rather key point around here, IMO.)
And if you object to the books simply being "out there", what do you suggest? Burning them? A culture does not grow by ingnorance
Re:It is not about the rice.
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
Dollars = Lives The US gross national product per capita is $31,746 SO, if you work from age 18 to 65 on average you will produce
about 1.5 million dollars in a lifetime. Therefore the average US life is worth 1.5 million dollars.
The average US citizen farts 100,000 times during their lives. Therefore, the average US life is worth 100,000 farts.
Many browsers offer an option like "accept only cookies that are only sent back to the originating server". The average user thinks of the content on a page or site as coming from a single server, so selecting the above option is their way of saying, "cnn.com can remember me, and unpopularviewpoint.com can remember me, but I'm not going to let the first know that I visit the second".
However, cookies from BigBrotherMarketing.com which are associated with ads placed on both sites, and fetched via URLs identifying the page they came from, can track a user across multiple seemingly unrealted sites. A reasonable person might say these opperate "without consent or authorization", since the user selected an option designed to prevent this kind of tracking.
Carnivore was conceived under the name "Omnivore" in February 1997. It was proposed originally for a Solaris X86 computer. Omnivore was replaced by Carnivore running on a Windows NT-based computer in June 1999.
The next version will be called "Herbivore" and will run on a Mac.;-)
For lifting big things into orbit, and for living in them for a long time, the Russians developed the best tech. However, if you are looking for something to work first-time, you have to remember that they crashed and just plain blew up a lot along the way. I admire their dedication and sacrifice, but, IMO, there's enough history to justify the comments.
Notice that this is the usual bad science rant. I think this film school wannabe is bluffing. There's a laundry list of abstract complains, but no details. This might be explained as avoiding spoilers, but one could give a lot more detail in a way that wouldn't give away the story. Also, of the two details that are given, one is about another movie, and the other is an incorrect comment about the history of physics as a science.
In fact, all this review gave me was the already well published movie critic's view, plus the "usual" science complaints.... not worth the pixels it's printed on.
IMO, the movie was fun and the tech details are about as good as it gets from Hollywood. It got more than enough right to be a pleasant change from the usual warp drive and screaming, swooping fighers SF settings. If you like science fiction, and can live with its admittedly low standard of character development, ignore the reviewer and see this movie.
I think I read somewhere that it was intended to retail for $599! I don't know about the rest of you but I can buy a full PC for
less.
It doesn't matter what you can buy for less, because they don't expect you to buy one. Their target market doesn't want a full PC. In fact, I'm convinced that a full third of AOL's users don't want PCs. PCs are too complicated. They just want AOL, the new electronic gossip fence... another pseudoinformative entertainment appliance like the phone and the TV.
And they don't shop where you do. So, someone who wants AOL and email and might, just might, venture onto the Internet some day, walks, reluctantly, into the local Gateway cow-store, and sees this thing at the low cost end of a row of PCs. They save money and avoid the complexity of a PC. It's a natural. And remember, this market outnumbers Slashdot readers by at least 1000:1.
This would be great for a book-sized portable computer. Position small versions of the "domes" where they will be under the user's thumbs when the computer is held with both hands.
Writing code that the average programmer cannot *understand* is not what classifies a good programmer. A good programmer will write code that is
elegant, simple, straight-forward, can be understood *and maintained* by the average programmer. It is the initial coding *solution* that discriminates
the good programmer from the coder.
The above is very true, but the point you argue against is not the point the author made. He didn't say the less skilled programmers could not understand the better programmers' code. He said they could not understand it much faster than it was being written. Code's quality is not the only issue in how quickly it can be understood.
For example, a programmer with a strong CS background can write code based on standard concepts that a programmer with a similar background could quickly understand, but that a programmer without that background would take much longer to understand. The time is really spent learning the concepts.
Also, a lot of code, especially web related code, uses technologies that only some readers are familiar with. Database access, CGI/Servlet APIs, sockets, etc. can be transparent or hours-with-a-manual difficult, depending on the reader's background. This applys to languages too. I can read Java at a decent speed, because I use it every day. JavaScipt takes longer, because I only use it every few months, and because I never wrote it full time. (And I won't even start on VBScript/ASP.;-) Many programmers don't have the luxury of limiting themselves to a single environment-of-choice, and learning is becoming a larger and larger part of the average programmer's day. And the difference between the productivity of learning-while-doing and just doing is always going to be huge.
The question was ridiculous anyway, as it applied to
such a small minority of its readers. It's a shame that a better question (one a little more pertinent to the concern to their readers) wasn't
chosen by the/. editors.
Fairness and respect towards the powerful and the popular tells us very little about a person's values. A true test of character is the way they treat those who can offer neither threat nor reward.
If/when these tags go into general use, every Radio Shack on the planet will be selling personal "bug detectors". Since the hardware to accurately read the tags has to be cheap enough for commercial use, a simple exciter/detector should be less than $10 (including X-acto brand percision deacivation system).
Of the above items, the only two that I think would be useful for a grade- or high-school student would be the news and academic
research. And how is accessing this information via the Internet better than picking up the newspaper or research journal?
It's better because it's there. The other sources are not there and will never will be, because no school has a library that big.
Whenever resources are limited, choices are made to best serve the majority. I remember having read everything my school and public library had on my personal technical interests. I wanted more but had hit their resouce limit. However, I can't honestly say every school and community library should have stocked what I would have read next (instead of some other kid of equal curiosity but different interests would have read next).
The great thing about the web is that you get all the URLs for one low price. No local storage scheme, physical or electronic, can do this. Not needing or wanting want 99.999% of them misses the point completely. The point is that people can get the.001% that matters them.
The huge point not addressed is the posibility of "interesting" entities that might be exist under other values of these critical numbers. It's all rather matter-centric, IMHO.
With our own universe's settings of the critical values, the electric and magnetting fields play together to create photons. It seems reasonable that at other settings of the cosmic dials, forces that are minior or even unnoticed in our universe could interact in "interesting" ways.
Even our own version of "interesting" (semi-durable patterns that interact with their environments and reproduce by combining information from two instances, with occasional copying errors thrown in for fun) might be achieved in totally different ways.
Therefore, I don't see evidence that our universe is surprising in a way that requires explanation.
I wouldn't want my kids going down to the library to research something on the Internet and, knowing how searches bring up
nonsense 98% of the time, pulling up some elephant sex porn site or something equally as disturbing. Then they'll come home and
ask you about it, then what are you going to say?
This should not be a rhetorical question.
Slashdot Mirror
It becomes completely non-weird if you stop thinking of it as a desktop machine. They have a test instrument which contains a processor. The processor is only as powerful as it has to be. Nothing surprising about it.
In the html for a hyperlink, the extra linking info is first, and the "information for display" comes second. Not the other way 'round as they describe. Nyah nyah! :-P
Furthermore, it could go all sorts of places in RAM or on disk. And, a relative URL doesn't contain "the complete address".
Forget prior art. Charge the idiots with fraud for trying to get money based on this crap.
The irony here is that Microsoft can wait until the money-losing Linux companies finally perfect their upstart open-source operating system.
He also misses the point that the "money losing Linux companies" are not, in general, focused on perfecting the OS.
The action in India is in programming, not hardware.
Indian has a unique combination of features that might allow it to become a "coding superpower". Its traditional culture and religion have a long history of abstract, written scholarship. The British made English a common second language. On the other hand, wages are not those of an industrialized country. Finally, it has a huge population, creating a "critical mass" of programmers within a single culture and legal system.
The whole Demming/Japan thing is about doing the same opperation in exactly the same way, time after time to produce the desired physical product. Sorry, but industrial CD production pretty much has this problem beat. And that's that's the only physical part of software "production". If you're doing exact repitition while coding, you're ether an idiot or you're paid by the line.
Whenever a programming task gets close to this level of repetition, someone writes a tool for it.
The only way a plan like this could do more good than harm would be if it was completely secret. And in that case, the original poster would not have heard of it, and it wouldn't be discussed on Slashdot. ;-)
If the average user receives anything the the listed sender didn't mean to send, they shouldn't run it, ever, even if it asks nicely. It's way too easy for someone to rewrite the "benign" virus/trojan to do something evil.
This might, in an indirect way, be the reason Java has been slow to catch on on Linux. Linux has it's own traditional support for web aps in CGI, Perl, and C. These work just fine on the Linux box on the developer's desk, and on the Linux box in the server room.
However, most of corporate America's big servers run a commercial Unix, while most of their developer desktops still belong to Bill. The the real "write once, run anywhere" is therefore "write and compile here, deploy there." And since server side programming doesn't use AWT or Swing, this really does work.
On the contrary, I think it's an indication of the success of our culture... that and the nature of a good story. The core of most stories is danger and conflict. But we've killed or driven off the dangerous animals. We've visited or looked down on every square inch of the planet. The continental US has not been invaded in living memeory. Roving bandits have no chance against radios. And a sane person's goal in any violent criminal encounter is simply to live long enough to call the police.
The world of the law abiding citizen just doesn't have as much adventure as it used to. Therefore, stories of "a man alone against his environment" are mostly about criminals.
We're not evil, just bored. And we know the difference between learning about something and doing it. (A rather key point around here, IMO.)
And if you object to the books simply being "out there", what do you suggest? Burning them? A culture does not grow by ingnorance
The average US citizen farts 100,000 times during their lives. Therefore, the average US life is worth 100,000 farts.
However, cookies from BigBrotherMarketing.com which are associated with ads placed on both sites, and fetched via URLs identifying the page they came from, can track a user across multiple seemingly unrealted sites. A reasonable person might say these opperate "without consent or authorization", since the user selected an option designed to prevent this kind of tracking.
The next version will be called "Herbivore" and will run on a Mac. ;-)
For lifting big things into orbit, and for living in them for a long time, the Russians developed the best tech. However, if you are looking for something to work first-time, you have to remember that they crashed and just plain blew up a lot along the way. I admire their dedication and sacrifice, but, IMO, there's enough history to justify the comments.
In fact, all this review gave me was the already well published movie critic's view, plus the "usual" science complaints.... not worth the pixels it's printed on.
IMO, the movie was fun and the tech details are about as good as it gets from Hollywood. It got more than enough right to be a pleasant change from the usual warp drive and screaming, swooping fighers SF settings. If you like science fiction, and can live with its admittedly low standard of character development, ignore the reviewer and see this movie.
It doesn't matter what you can buy for less, because they don't expect you to buy one. Their target market doesn't want a full PC. In fact, I'm convinced that a full third of AOL's users don't want PCs. PCs are too complicated. They just want AOL, the new electronic gossip fence... another pseudoinformative entertainment appliance like the phone and the TV.
And they don't shop where you do. So, someone who wants AOL and email and might, just might, venture onto the Internet some day, walks, reluctantly, into the local Gateway cow-store, and sees this thing at the low cost end of a row of PCs. They save money and avoid the complexity of a PC. It's a natural. And remember, this market outnumbers Slashdot readers by at least 1000:1.
This would be great for a book-sized portable computer. Position small versions of the "domes" where they will be under the user's thumbs when the computer is held with both hands.
The above is very true, but the point you argue against is not the point the author made. He didn't say the less skilled programmers could not understand the better programmers' code. He said they could not understand it much faster than it was being written. Code's quality is not the only issue in how quickly it can be understood.
For example, a programmer with a strong CS background can write code based on standard concepts that a programmer with a similar background could quickly understand, but that a programmer without that background would take much longer to understand. The time is really spent learning the concepts.
Also, a lot of code, especially web related code, uses technologies that only some readers are familiar with. Database access, CGI/Servlet APIs, sockets, etc. can be transparent or hours-with-a-manual difficult, depending on the reader's background. This applys to languages too. I can read Java at a decent speed, because I use it every day. JavaScipt takes longer, because I only use it every few months, and because I never wrote it full time. (And I won't even start on VBScript/ASP. ;-) Many programmers don't have the luxury of limiting themselves to a single environment-of-choice, and learning is becoming a larger and larger part of the average programmer's day. And the difference between the productivity of learning-while-doing and just doing is always going to be huge.
Fairness and respect towards the powerful and the popular tells us very little about a person's values. A true test of character is the way they treat those who can offer neither threat nor reward.
Amazing, but true. Here's an example. Of course, you could sidestep this one by just not telling them that your idea of a "Supreme Being" isn't in any way supernatural.
If/when these tags go into general use, every Radio Shack on the planet will be selling personal "bug detectors". Since the hardware to accurately read the tags has to be cheap enough for commercial use, a simple exciter/detector should be less than $10 (including X-acto brand percision deacivation system).
From the CNN article:
In afternoon Nasdaq trading Friday, shares of Microsoft were up $3.88 at $68.31.
It's better because it's there. The other sources are not there and will never will be, because no school has a library that big.
Whenever resources are limited, choices are made to best serve the majority. I remember having read everything my school and public library had on my personal technical interests. I wanted more but had hit their resouce limit. However, I can't honestly say every school and community library should have stocked what I would have read next (instead of some other kid of equal curiosity but different interests would have read next).
The great thing about the web is that you get all the URLs for one low price. No local storage scheme, physical or electronic, can do this. Not needing or wanting want 99.999% of them misses the point completely. The point is that people can get the .001% that matters them.
With our own universe's settings of the critical values, the electric and magnetting fields play together to create photons. It seems reasonable that at other settings of the cosmic dials, forces that are minior or even unnoticed in our universe could interact in "interesting" ways.
Even our own version of "interesting" (semi-durable patterns that interact with their environments and reproduce by combining information from two instances, with occasional copying errors thrown in for fun) might be achieved in totally different ways.
Therefore, I don't see evidence that our universe is surprising in a way that requires explanation.
I wouldn't want my kids going down to the library to research something on the Internet and, knowing how searches bring up nonsense 98% of the time, pulling up some elephant sex porn site or something equally as disturbing. Then they'll come home and ask you about it, then what are you going to say? This should not be a rhetorical question.
This could be a fight over which side gets to know the system's holes?