Second, it's a fairly
safe bet that to achieve even reasonable performance, MS compiles vertex shaders into SSE, SSE2, 3DNow! or
standard floating point code at runtime. Who do you think out there is willing and capable of spending the time
required to write that kind of code?
Hope they can get funding enough to allow their DSL customers to migrate to other providers.
Can any slashdotter name where funding comes from? . . .
Why would any halfway sane investor put money into something only to fund moving customers away?
Northpoint is the subcontractor for many ISPs who when resell the DSL services to other customers. If these companies want time to find another service provider to service their customers, then they may be willing to pay NorthPoint to keep going for a couple of months so that the don't end up with some seriously pissed off customers.
I worked for an ISP once which resold DSL services... At $75/months for up to 4MB down and 1MB up unmetered, they made it real clear that this was only for personal NON commercial uses. Nontheless -- when our sub-contractor decided to bring the service down for half a day for 'routine maintenance' at 9:00am and without any warning (twice!), one of our support people got a call from a guy who was absolutely livid. He ranted on about how this outage was costing him $6,000 a day (an hour? it was a while ago!). Reminders that the line was supposed to be for non-comercial uses didn't help.
I doubt that this guy would be likely to wait a month for the switchover process from NorthPoint to AT&T to complete. If someone wanted to keep someone like him as a customer, they'd have to take the loss-leader to cover the running of his service while the switchover paperwork was done. --
This would definitely make sense, if AT&T thought that they could charge more for their DSL connections. If they took the old contract, they'd have to keep the old pricing.. If they 'have to' renegotiate a new contract with the old NorthPoint customers, they can renegotiate the whole contract -- including pricing and conditions
You would become a new AT&T customer, using old NorthPoint equipment, as opposed to a grandfathered-in NorthPoint customer. --
There are two possibilities with the last tale of the woman and her son:
She could have been lieing through her teeth -- trying to get the address of someone for some nefarious (or benign) reason -- hoping that a sob story of a run-away son would get AOL to break the rules.
People can tell pretty convincing lies, just to get what they want. I remember I once managed to well up crocodile tears trying to talk my way out of something I was guilty of. (I later got caught). Both cons and actors are professionally trained for the task.
It's possible that she really is a freaked-out mom trying to figure out where her son is. In this case, unless there's something we weren't told -- like the message previous to that was some guy telling her son how he'd like to make him look like the goatsex guy -- I'd be inclined to bet my money that it's a false alarm. 90% probability that her son is doing something like going off to the Eminim concert, or meeting his (secret) girlfriend.
Even if it turns out to be something nasty going on, you still want a court order -- i.e. she should go through the police. If it turns out that her son's gone off to meet with Geoffrey Dahmler, what's she going to do by herself? Go out, track him down and become part of a mother/son two-course meal?
The worst case would be she prepares for the worst, goes out armed to the teeth, and ends up putting a bullet through the head of the guy who answers the door -- finding out later that it's her son's girlfriends dad.
If it was me, the only thing I would have done different would have been to mention that "I can't do anything without a court order". If she's legit, then she can call the cops. If not, then she'll go away.
WIth respect to how nasy people can be, consider the math: Let's consider 99.5% of all users to be normal. The other 0.5% are the ones we'll consider 'deviant'. Out of the N million AOL users, this is still going to give you thousands of people to deal with. This isn't "all AOL users", or even "most" of them. This is 0.5%.
To put it in a more personal perspective: In a school of 500 kids, this would be two or three people. What are the three most whacked-out stories you heard about people in your school? Extend that out a few years for them to get some practice, and you've got the AOL top.5% . Now multiply that by 20 thousand and you've got the CAP caseload. Not too hard, is it? --
Activism is already in the classroom -- commercial activism. Microsoft is 'giving discounts' to schools, Nike is buying add space in gymnasiums. Even some of our education is biased (it pretty much always is). This includes promoting our national history as 'good and right', glofifying Capitalism over other economic systems, and a presumption that our rather warped and minimal version of democracy is the best choice out there.
You can choose what you teach, or you can let it be taught for you -- often by commercial interests. As long as it fits within the defined curriculum, there's nothing wrong with expounding your own thoughts on things -- as long as you identify it as your own opinion and not official dogma.
I went to Junior high at a Catholic boarding school. The priests there were willing to discuss things like the gritty parts of the history of the Catholic church and creationism vs darwinism and why a literal reading of Genesis was problematic. Some of what we were taught was not completely flattering to the Catholic Church. When it diverged from the official church line, it was generally identified as such...
I'm glad that my teachers were willing to 'step out of the box'. I think that it gave us all more room to think about things for ourselves.
_____
I think that exposing students to Linux is a great thing.. At least then they know that they have a choice. What they do with that choice once they get home should be up to them. --
It's not quite a pyramid scheme, but it definitely smells of a scheme. In BC, the 'legitimate' places that 'hire' extras for the movie industry are not allowed to charge for the process. The expectation is that they'll get the money from their percentage of your paycheque.
If they're not going to be getting enough from your paycheque to cover the employee startup expenses, then chances are that you're not going to be getting much work.
I'd say much the same thing about their startup scheme. If they're not going to be getting enough work out of you to cover a $2,500 course, chances are that they're not getting work.
This thing smells of scam from day one. Had I seen that setup, I would have walked away on principle. The latest incident (new exec comes in, followed by mass resignations), sounds like a legal smokescreen (now who are you going to sue?).
My suggestion s to start talking to your favorite lawyer, and keep dibs on the executive (both old
and new). I would expect that most of the money is traveling with the old exec.
As for the founder being a good meaning guy who just got blindsided by some nasty management, he was in on the design of the company and it's business plan, he whould have helped hire the initial exec and management. He had (or should have had) a general, or even a specific understanding of what was being promised to studends and how that coincided (didn't) with the 'real' contracts that they were getting.
Now, it's possible that the founders and exec were really well-meaning, and didn't have the slightest idea as to how bad things were and how their trainees were gonna get hosed -- if that was so, then I would talk about them being extremely stupid and/or culpably negligent. In either case, they should not only be left holding the bag, they should have it stuck over their heads before they're hung out to dry. --
From the point of view of the person running a web site, a self-made certificate is quite secure -- You don't have to trust a third party to keep your private key private.
From the point of view of a customer, having a trusted third party to verify a web site's identity can help you know that a web site is probably who they claim that they are.... If people started scamming IDs with thawte or verisign ID,s it would break the trust that people have in thawte/verisign Certs -- that would lessen the value of getting thawte/verisign certs -- and browser builders (Netscape, MS, Mozilla, etc.) might stop putting their public root cert in their default cert list.
If all you're doing is talking to yourself, and people who know you personally, you can give them a copy of a floppy/CD with your root cert on it and they (you) can install it on the remote machine.
If you then generate your cite cert, and then remove the private key of the root cert from the machine then -- barring a breakin where your root private gets stolen/coppied, you have some physical certainty that your key is not compromised.
This, of course, requires that your machine remain otherwise secure.
----
I use my own, private cert, on my personal web site. I trust it completely. If I was going to be doing sensitive work remotely, I'd use it in preference to a thawte or verisign key -- however, I'd personally install the (my) root cert on my remote machine(s).
--
If enough people can show examples where they've implemented this prior to the publication date of the patent, I think that it could be construed as proof that it was 'obvious to an expert reasonably practised in the arts.' --
Yes, it's nice that they haven't tried shutting down other polls due to their patent. However, the fact is, they....
were only granted the patent in January of this year. Not enough time to prove them good (or bad) patent-owning citizens. Given their rather cut-throat history, however, I wouldn't be inclined to bet much more than my cat's collar that they would never try to (mis)use their patent. --
database n : an organized body of related information
That is the entirety of the definition in gdict.
It doesn't have to be SQL to be a database. I remember UNIX documentation on how the various UNIX text tools (cut, grep, paste, sort, etc.) were used to turn flat text files into a simple relational database. In that respect, the earlier slashdot polls (which seem to have done precisely that) could be considered a 'database implementation'.
Shrinkwrap doesn't make a database, any more than the requirement for a purchase order makes good software.
--
The big question is: Did you publish the code (i.e. can you show that you gave either the code, or a description of how it worked, to somebody else). Remember that some sort of puplication of the idea is a critical aspect of prior art. --
The evil aspect of *csh for me is that it's just close enough to something like bash to confuse you into thinking you're using the real thing. Unfortunately, the programming constructs are quite different, so you have to remember all the time whether the shell you're working in/programming is 'c' type.
This problem was a lot worse when there were versions of *nix that didn't recognize the #!
protocol at the start of shell scripts.
The compatibility problems between c and non-c shells was enough that I just gave up on 'c's. That having been said, the one thing I miss the most (I rarely used filename completion) was the {a,b,c} filename expansion construct. It was kinda nice being able to generate 20 filenames with X{a,b,c,d}{1,2,3,4,5}. It's about the only thing in the c shells that I'll skip out of ksh to play with from time to time. --
For example, his first
liquid-fueled rocket flew 40 feet high, but also 184 feet to the side
Not bad for a first attempt. Saying that that's a failure would be like comparing Linus' first (pre-pre-pre release) Linux kernel to 2.4.
It's almost trivial to do better now-- with the hindsight of his (and others') experimentation, failures and successes. About the only thinf he wwould have had to work off of would have been
the solid-rockets of chinese and civil war technology. -- kinda like trying to build a 4-stroke engine, based on the early steam engines..... It's better than nothing -- but not by much. --
The primary focus of Palm and Handspring are the palm pilot. If they were to succeed in their request for a halt to production, it would bring the entire companies to a halt. If you stop microsoft from selling Windows CE, then you shut down a small portion of the company, and they can even absorb the affected employees into different sections without much pain.
Give us the money or we shut down your company, is going to have far more of an impact on the executives of Palm than it is on Mr. Gates. As such, it's more likely that Palm is going to go for a settlement. --
In grade 5, using a calculator to figure out 35/17 would have been cheating.
These days, I use bc(1) to do things like that... I even have a script for doing BC one-liners from the shell (too lazy to do all that GUI calculator stuff).
If the course was about building complex systems, then borrowing other code would probably be OK.. As long as you make it clear what's you're code, and what came from elsewhere. If the course was about learning how to write programs, then 'borrowing' someone elses' code would be against the purpose of the course.
Think about it for a second.
Just about any problem simple enough for a beginner programer to solve already has a solution written. Bubble sort? No problem. Quick sort? Right here!. You can get a garbage collector from this page. (none of these took me more than a minute to find with google).
So how are you going to actually learn how to program if all you're doing is stealing other people's code. More importantly: How do you learn how to fix problems with code if you're doing this?
Of course, it would be hell for an instructor. If you wanted to force your students to write their own code, the only problems that you could give them would be problems that even the best experts hadn't been able to solve.
Welcome to computing 101. This week I'm going to be teaching you about loops. To force you all to write your own code, I'm going to assign each one of you a different device for which the manufacturer has not released specs. Your first assignment is to reverse engineer your device and write a device driver using a polling loop.
Yes, and the 72 hours starts after Napster has been given the list of filenames. (presumably on disk). I hope that Napster lets people know which files (that they are sharing) are being filtered out. There are two reasons for this:
where the RIAA accidently (or maliciously) asks for the blocking of legitimate works that the artist does want shared.
so that researchers can figure out whether banning a song from napster affects it's popularity in the stores.
so that people have the ability to respond appropriately when they learn that the RIAA (or others) don't want their songs listened to. (or don't mind).
One of the things that people will pay for is the fact that so much development is already done on Oracle. I worked for a company that wanted to do some work with Real Networks. They had their back-end done on Oracle. Do you think that we're going to pay them $150K to redevelop their stuff on MySql, or put out $20K for a web copy of Oracle???
Then there's the case of the company who's DB is worth $1M/hour when it's down. Who are you going to sue if MySql goes down for a day? Disclaimers aside, Oracle actually has some money you can go after.
Where the development has already occurred on an OS DB, there's lots of reason to keep it there (as long as it doesn't break because of an inherent design problem/bug). Similarly with a big $$ system. In either case, the cost of the database is usually small compared to the cost of redevelopment and/or breakage.
--
Linux is a rather variable beast. Trying to nail down the limits of Linux is rather like trying to nail down the limits of the mamal class.
Although Redhat/Debian, etc. are the best known versions of Linux [human], it ranges from PDAs/embeded units [doormouse, bumblebee bat] to IBMs mainframe systems and beowulf clusters [elephants, whales].
A minimal Linux kernel does not necessarily need a bourne shell. Unlike with Windows/DOS, the Linux shell is an application program like any other. It can be replaced with a GUI shell with near zero effort.
So then, what's the advantage of Linux then? You're not limited to any solution, and you have the advantage of a whole base of applications which can be used to back-end your front end programs, a well-built, stable kernel that's extensible to your heart's content, a well documented programming interface, and programming tools out the ying yang.
Oh yeah -- and you can do meaningful development and testing on your desktop machine.
Slashdot Mirror
--
I worked for an ISP once which resold DSL services... At $75/months for up to 4MB down and 1MB up unmetered, they made it real clear that this was only for personal NON commercial uses. Nontheless -- when our sub-contractor decided to bring the service down for half a day for 'routine maintenance' at 9:00am and without any warning (twice!), one of our support people got a call from a guy who was absolutely livid . He ranted on about how this outage was costing him $6,000 a day (an hour? it was a while ago!). Reminders that the line was supposed to be for non-comercial uses didn't help.
I doubt that this guy would be likely to wait a month for the switchover process from NorthPoint to AT&T to complete. If someone wanted to keep someone like him as a customer, they'd have to take the loss-leader to cover the running of his service while the switchover paperwork was done.
--
--
You would become a new AT&T customer, using old NorthPoint equipment, as opposed to a grandfathered-in NorthPoint customer.
--
-
She could have been lieing through her teeth -- trying to get the address of someone for some nefarious (or benign) reason -- hoping that a sob story of a run-away son would get AOL to break the rules.
- It's possible that she really is a freaked-out mom trying to figure out where her son is. In this case, unless there's something we weren't told -- like the message previous to that was some guy telling her son how he'd like to make him look like the goatsex guy -- I'd be inclined to bet my money that it's a false alarm. 90% probability that her son is doing something like going off to the Eminim concert, or meeting his (secret) girlfriend.
WIth respect to how nasy people can be, consider the math: Let's consider 99.5% of all users to be normal. The other 0.5% are the ones we'll consider 'deviant'. Out of the N million AOL users, this is still going to give you thousands of people to deal with. This isn't "all AOL users", or even "most" of them. This is 0.5%.People can tell pretty convincing lies, just to get what they want. I remember I once managed to well up crocodile tears trying to talk my way out of something I was guilty of. (I later got caught). Both cons and actors are professionally trained for the task.
Even if it turns out to be something nasty going on, you still want a court order -- i.e. she should go through the police. If it turns out that her son's gone off to meet with Geoffrey Dahmler, what's she going to do by herself? Go out, track him down and become part of a mother/son two-course meal?
The worst case would be she prepares for the worst, goes out armed to the teeth, and ends up putting a bullet through the head of the guy who answers the door -- finding out later that it's her son's girlfriends dad.
If it was me, the only thing I would have done different would have been to mention that "I can't do anything without a court order". If she's legit, then she can call the cops. If not, then she'll go away.
To put it in a more personal perspective: In a school of 500 kids, this would be two or three people. What are the three most whacked-out stories you heard about people in your school? Extend that out a few years for them to get some practice, and you've got the AOL top .5% . Now multiply that by 20 thousand and you've got the CAP caseload. Not too hard, is it?
--
You can choose what you teach, or you can let it be taught for you -- often by commercial interests. As long as it fits within the defined curriculum, there's nothing wrong with expounding your own thoughts on things -- as long as you identify it as your own opinion and not official dogma.
I went to Junior high at a Catholic boarding school. The priests there were willing to discuss things like the gritty parts of the history of the Catholic church and creationism vs darwinism and why a literal reading of Genesis was problematic. Some of what we were taught was not completely flattering to the Catholic Church. When it diverged from the official church line, it was generally identified as such...
I'm glad that my teachers were willing to 'step out of the box'. I think that it gave us all more room to think about things for ourselves.
_____
I think that exposing students to Linux is a great thing.. At least then they know that they have a choice. What they do with that choice once they get home should be up to them.
--
If they're not going to be getting enough from your paycheque to cover the employee startup expenses, then chances are that you're not going to be getting much work.
I'd say much the same thing about their startup scheme. If they're not going to be getting enough work out of you to cover a $2,500 course, chances are that they're not getting work.
This thing smells of scam from day one. Had I seen that setup, I would have walked away on principle. The latest incident (new exec comes in, followed by mass resignations), sounds like a legal smokescreen (now who are you going to sue?).
My suggestion s to start talking to your favorite lawyer, and keep dibs on the executive (both old and new). I would expect that most of the money is traveling with the old exec.
As for the founder being a good meaning guy who just got blindsided by some nasty management, he was in on the design of the company and it's business plan, he whould have helped hire the initial exec and management. He had (or should have had) a general, or even a specific understanding of what was being promised to studends and how that coincided (didn't) with the 'real' contracts that they were getting.
Now, it's possible that the founders and exec were really well-meaning, and didn't have the slightest idea as to how bad things were and how their trainees were gonna get hosed -- if that was so, then I would talk about them being extremely stupid and/or culpably negligent. In either case, they should not only be left holding the bag, they should have it stuck over their heads before they're hung out to dry.
--
From the point of view of a customer, having a trusted third party to verify a web site's identity can help you know that a web site is probably who they claim that they are.... If people started scamming IDs with thawte or verisign ID,s it would break the trust that people have in thawte/verisign Certs -- that would lessen the value of getting thawte/verisign certs -- and browser builders (Netscape, MS, Mozilla, etc.) might stop putting their public root cert in their default cert list.
If all you're doing is talking to yourself, and people who know you personally, you can give them a copy of a floppy/CD with your root cert on it and they (you) can install it on the remote machine.
If you then generate your cite cert, and then remove the private key of the root cert from the machine then -- barring a breakin where your root private gets stolen/coppied, you have some physical certainty that your key is not compromised.
This, of course, requires that your machine remain otherwise secure.
----
I use my own, private cert, on my personal web site. I trust it completely. If I was going to be doing sensitive work remotely, I'd use it in preference to a thawte or verisign key -- however, I'd personally install the (my) root cert on my remote machine(s).
--
If enough people can show examples where they've implemented this prior to the publication date of the patent, I think that it could be construed as proof that it was 'obvious to an expert reasonably practised in the arts.'
--
--
n : an organized body of related information
That is the entirety of the definition in gdict.
It doesn't have to be SQL to be a database. I remember UNIX documentation on how the various UNIX text tools (cut, grep, paste, sort, etc.) were used to turn flat text files into a simple relational database. In that respect, the earlier slashdot polls (which seem to have done precisely that) could be considered a 'database implementation'.
Shrinkwrap doesn't make a database, any more than the requirement for a purchase order makes good software.
--
The big question is:
Did you publish the code (i.e. can you show that you gave either the code, or a description of how it worked, to somebody else). Remember that some sort of puplication of the idea is a critical aspect of prior art.
--
This problem was a lot worse when there were versions of *nix that didn't recognize the #! protocol at the start of shell scripts.
The compatibility problems between c and non-c shells was enough that I just gave up on 'c's. That having been said, the one thing I miss the most (I rarely used filename completion) was the {a,b,c} filename expansion construct. It was kinda nice being able to generate 20 filenames with X{a,b,c,d}{1,2,3,4,5}. It's about the only thing in the c shells that I'll skip out of ksh to play with from time to time.
--
--
As I remember it, Windows can allow file access based on workstation, can't it?
--
Give us the money or we shut down your company, is going to have far more of an impact on the executives of Palm than it is on Mr. Gates. As such, it's more likely that Palm is going to go for a settlement.
--
If the course was about building complex systems, then borrowing other code would probably be OK.. As long as you make it clear what's you're code, and what came from elsewhere. If the course was about learning how to write programs, then 'borrowing' someone elses' code would be against the purpose of the course.
Think about it for a second. Just about any problem simple enough for a beginner programer to solve already has a solution written. Bubble sort? No problem. Quick sort? Right here!. You can get a garbage collector from this page. (none of these took me more than a minute to find with google).
So how are you going to actually learn how to program if all you're doing is stealing other people's code. More importantly: How do you learn how to fix problems with code if you're doing this?
Of course, it would be hell for an instructor. If you wanted to force your students to write their own code, the only problems that you could give them would be problems that even the best experts hadn't been able to solve.
--
It reminded me of that song too -- so much that I hunted down a rendition of it on the net (geocities site).
--
First post wasn't even up, and it was already slashdotted.
--
I have a second copy of the article without the caps. Also on my personal machine. Surprising how much easier it is to read like that.
--
I have a mirror taken from another mirror. Someone please mod up the article that announced the original mirror.
--
- where the RIAA accidently (or maliciously) asks for the blocking of legitimate works that the artist does want shared.
- so that researchers can figure out whether banning a song from napster affects it's popularity in the stores.
- so that people have the ability to respond appropriately when they learn that the RIAA (or others) don't want their songs listened to. (or don't mind).
(don't bother telling me that I can't count)--
Then there's the case of the company who's DB is worth $1M/hour when it's down. Who are you going to sue if MySql goes down for a day? Disclaimers aside, Oracle actually has some money you can go after.
Where the development has already occurred on an OS DB, there's lots of reason to keep it there (as long as it doesn't break because of an inherent design problem/bug). Similarly with a big $$ system. In either case, the cost of the database is usually small compared to the cost of redevelopment and/or breakage.
--
Although Redhat/Debian, etc. are the best known versions of Linux [human], it ranges from PDAs/embeded units [doormouse, bumblebee bat] to IBMs mainframe systems and beowulf clusters [elephants, whales].
A minimal Linux kernel does not necessarily need a bourne shell. Unlike with Windows/DOS, the Linux shell is an application program like any other. It can be replaced with a GUI shell with near zero effort.
So then, what's the advantage of Linux then? You're not limited to any solution, and you have the advantage of a whole base of applications which can be used to back-end your front end programs, a well-built, stable kernel that's extensible to your heart's content, a well documented programming interface, and programming tools out the ying yang.
Oh yeah -- and you can do meaningful development and testing on your desktop machine.
(anybody want to add to the list?)
--
Dont need Wintendows binaries. You can run the server under Linux and let the clients run their front ends on Windows. --- Kinda like with Samba.
--