And then 5 seconds later the worm du jour will root the box with the exact same vulnerability as last time because, you guessed it, a read only OS cannot be patched.
Granted, this distro won't have any servers running on it, but you'll have skype, firefox, IM, all running the exact same widely distributed version. You can bet exploit writers will target those versions very hard.
So, yeah, trust it for banking, but only for about a month after they are released. After that, install a desktop linux and keep it patched.
Speaking of which, there are two replicas (originals?) of Babbage's Analytical Engine which actually work and are demonstrated with their original algorithms.
I remember reading somewhere that the museums sell list of primes calculated by the machine, with Ada's original code, but I can't find the link right now. (Or was it roots of a polynomial?)
Those would certainly count as the oldest program still running, but I can't find more info on the program being demonstrated ATM.
The right strategy is to use the 20 years between now and 2027 to build an orbiter/lander (with a big-ass nuke, nuclear reactor powering a big-ass laser, or big-ass solar sail of reflective/absorptive paint -- and as much as I like nukes, the big can of paint's probably the best way to go -- attached). Interestingly, project constellation is supposed to allow for a mars mission around 2030. In fact, the Ares 5 is supposed to have its maiden flight in 2018, and it should have enough power to put interplanetary crafts in orbit. The rest of the time is spacecraft preparation and assembly.
Maybe NASA is quietly working on this whole thing after all?
Also, FYI, there's more to rendezvous than just being up there while the asteroid passes by, you also have to match speeds, which isn't easy given the speed with which Apophys will pass by, so orbiter/landers are right out. A more likely mission profile would be: - Launch from earth at some point around 2027, but on a powered orbit that goes lower on the gravity well and that intersects with Apophis on the far side of the solar system (big boom over there) - Launch around 2018 and accelerate away from earth so that Apophis eventually catches up after 2027 - Put up a lot of tons of something in high earth orbit to hit Apophis as it passes by on 2027, dropping it into a lower orbit.
Also, nukes in space are overrated. On earth they heat up the air to make it expand into a blastwave. In space you'd have to spray water around to get the same effect (Or drill down, but that too much of a cliche).
The buggy code would run on user mode, not kernel mode. The only way to compromise a system with this security hole would be to have the sysadmin install a 4.3-compiled daemon running as root or a 4.3-compiled suid root program on an older kernel. A user can copy a 4.3-compiled program to his home directory, but all he'll get is a crashing program.
Yes, another variable to worry about when upgrading compilers and kernels, but not as easy as you make it sound.
Windows does not have signal handlers natively. (or actually, only a few now that I google it:SIGABRT, SIGFPE, SIGILL, SIGINT, SIGSEGV, SIGTERM) There is the whole SEH C-language exceptions which take over some of the uses, but no other signals natively. So you won't write a signal handler that gets called on a timer.
Full signals for GCC-compiled programs would be implemented by Cygwin which should give you timer signals and so on. Since the standard way to upgrade GCC under cygwin is to use the cygwin upgrade/package manager, they can just make the new GCC package depend on an updated cygwin DLL which could set the correct flag for you in a thunk before passing on the signal.
Don't bother trying to compile GCC yourself under cygwin, it's quite painful. Or at least time-consuming, the slower process spawning makes configure take an hour or more last time I tried it a few years ago. And then you have to wait for make bootstrap to finish.
Then again, MS isn't notorious for following standards. If this does show up under windows (say when starting an SEH handler) they'll just say that that's the windows ABI and ignore it.
Hell, it might even be different under win98/XP/Vista, as they are different kernel.
I was thinking about it this weekend, and realized MS wouldn't even need to release a whole new console.
The PS3 is being helped along by the fact that it's a cheap Blu ray player.
If in the next couple of months, blu-ray comes up on top, MS could just release an XBox Blu, with a hard drive and blu ray drive, but the exact same internals, guaranteeing compatibility. MS already produces a bunch of different editions of the XBox anyway. Release a blu-ray addon for older customers to use instead of the HDDVD one and you're good to go. This both assume, of course, that the expansion bus for the HDDVD drive has enough bandwidth.
You can ensure developer support simply by allowing them to assume the existence of a hard drive for bluray titles (make sure the addon has one).
Customers will like it because it's still cheaper than a PS3, specially if you already have an XBox. The game library is also a great upside.
The problem with the PS3 is going to be timing. As you mention, the PS3 is just now coming to a good state. By December we should expect great games for the PS3 as the developers begin to actually understand the hardware. If nothing else changed, the PS3 might take over the game industry.
The problem, as I mentioned, is timing. Let's say MS settled for a 4-year iteration on the XBox. That would mean that by November they'd be announcing the new Xbox (say XBox 3), to be released by December 2009. It would include (making it up, but not far fetched) Hi-Def, wii-style controllers, BD/HD-DVD drive (whichever wins out), some 6 cores as opposed to the PS3's 1 core+6 DSPs and a normal architecture that won't take your developers years to come to grips to and makes multiplatform games easier to develop, plus full backward compatibility.
Oh, and add interoperability with MS Surface and a MS multitouch phone as a handheld gaming platform. (ok, more far-fetched now)
Come December 2008, would you buy a PS3, which Sony always stated should last for 10 years, or wait around for the next Xbox? If you were a developer, being approached by MS for support this year, what platform would you focus on developing for? If you were developing next year?
Heck, even if MS announces they'd have the new version in 2010, the PS3 would still be in trouble.
And exactly how many rapes and molestations occur because of MySpace? How about we place the same restrictions on schools and churches, where you are certainly more likely to end up being molested. Most children are enrolled in school and churches by their parents. They don't enroll in schools their parents don't want them to.
From TFA:
"We expected something unexpected, but we did not expect this," says Skinner. I really don't have anything to say about it other than... "huhwhat?" If he said something like "we expected something unexpected, and that's what we got," that would be better. I'm guessing they were expecting something unexpected but got the Spanish Inquisition instead. A fine astronomy tradition. Even Galileo didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.
But it's 7am on Monday and that doesn't help in any case. Ok... that statement was unexpected...
It's interesting at least. Things to check: -Is it statistically significant (seems like it, a large percentage of voters probably participated) -Is it normal historically (You'd need to pull the numbers from the last primaries to see if they are homogeneous or not). Has NH been redistricted since the last election?
Maybe the richer districts have voting machines and vote for Clinton or some such. Plus with gerrymandering voting districts might be split across political issues anyway.
You'd probably have to do an ANOVA with spread from average against voting mode and year.
With.doc, MS has the whole market. With ODF, customers get a choice: They can go with MS or with Arjen's company.
If MS Office is the best solution then nothing changes, but if a dutch company can offer anything better (better pricing, support, features, localization, etc.) customers suddenly have a choice they didn't have before. Notice that this move would allow office to coexist with other apps, unlike other countries that mandate open source solutions.
Just because it benefits Dutch people (industry and users) doesn't mean it's a bad law.
Heck, for a politician, even without kickbacks, it's a reasonable thing to do, just from a trade-deficit and job-creation point of view. Should the government send money to a foreign company (MS) for the exact same solution produced locally, or should they spend locally and also create jobs?
This isn't even protectionist (unless they add import taxes). This is just leveling the playing field. Technically, MS can keep competing with local companies anyway.
The two disasters were warned against by NASA owns personnel, had the managers listened to their rocket-scientists then those 'accidents' would not have happened.
Excuse me? The rocket boosters were warned against, but the piece of foam was studied by NASA's engineers, ran two simulations on it, and the engineers studying it decided it was safe to reenter.
There were some comments by other people at NASA about "what about the foam" a couple days before landing, and a "why are you bringing this up now and not last week" somewhere in there, but the study was done.
Granted, the study was flawed, but it was not a management decision. It was sad watching the press conferences after the events with all but the CNN reporter trying to imply that there was some gross negligence to blame.
(Or would you prefer they had decided to let the astronauts die of starvation in orbit rather than risk a reentry they thought was safe?)
The obsession with expanding means that businesses are always trying to think in terms of "getting more customers" and "appealing to a wider base" and so forth. The problem is that there are already lots of companies (or websites in this case) that appeal to that generic audience. Adding yourself into that pool certainly doesn't guarantee increasing profits. And yet, expanding is not a bad idea, but that is not the only way to expand.
It used to be that TV shows would get dumbed down or junk the shark to appeal to a wider variety of people. Now instead you see more and more spinoffs. They leverage the skill and some of the familiarity of the old show to create a new show that appeals to a different group, or to get more views to what could in some ways be "the same show".
If slashdot wants to grow I hope they do it by setting up sister sites instead. They have the experience, code and hardware to set up sister sites for different audiences. Maybe something as simple as spinning off politics and YRO, with more politically savvy editors. Maybe doing joint stories with AnimeFu, to liven things up. Maybe setting up a digg-wannabe site, with a slash-style discussions. You could try out (marked) slashvertisements on other sites and see how people react while the mother-site stays the same (since you already know./ers would reject them).
Or work with a social networking site to connect user profiles, journals and discussions together with all their other features (if the users choose to).
Of course, you'd have to help these sites grow. Joint stories, publishing selected top stories on each other's front page, ads back and forth, advice to the editors of the new sites, etc. Growing while keeping the original community alive and safe, but leveraging the experience of your old admins.
The styles of the sites should diverge, and some sites will sell off more than others. Some sites will use more AJAX, more pictures, more OMG ponies, more whatever. Rob knows already what this community needs. Start another site and figure what their community needs. It's a lot easier to do this for/. and co than for anybody else.
If I put up an article on "Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online" which describes a site with a single stick figure webcomic that I updated six months ago, then the article should be considered garbage and rightfully go for speedy deletion. Nobody wants this kind of useless garbage polluting all the searches on wikipedia, plus it detracts from the more professional look of the site (compare to everything2)
The problem comes in when someone nominates for speedy deletion an article on a website which has clearly been regularly updated for years and has an active fanbase. Not only is this a request for cleanup but it is also a slap in the face as you're put in the same category as the Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online. (unfortunately I don't have the list of deleted webcomic and the site is/.ed but there were some long live ones IIRC)
I'd suggest that any web site that has been online and regularly updated for a year cannot be speedily deleted.
Another suggestion is to, instead of deleting, move them to a webcomic wiki.
But in the end, wikipedia has articles on every single pokemon. I'd consider webcomics more interesting than that.
I'm sitting in front of an LCD right now. If I lean in I can see the pixels (1280x1024 17" screen). I see columns red green and blue, separate pixels from each.
Yes, each green pixel is made by putting in a green filter (subtracting all but the green) but that's not what additive/subtractive means in this case.
Color is mixed in an additive process, whereby your eye optically blurs out adjacent pixels and then the colors from the different pixels are mixed. If you want white you light up the individual pixels, which creates three very bright dots of different colors, which are then added to create white. The fact that mechanically you light up the pixels by diasabling their absortion is of no interest to the discussions.
"Turing Machines" are a language. A Turing Machine is a program. A Universal Turing Machine is an interpreter for the language of Turing machines and can therefore do anything any TM can given appropriate inputs.
"Turing machines" are devices that can perform computations. They are very simple, a bunch of states and transitions, plus a tape (not going into the format here).
A specific Turing Machine is a certain configuration, with a defined set of states and transitions. These can be fashioned to perform a calculation on the string the tape is filled with before the machine starts. The result would be on the tape when the mahcine stops (WOLOG). For example, you can make a TM that tells you whether an imput number is even, or prime, etc.
Since TMs are so simple, it is possible to use them in proofs. For example, for any calculation you can program in any computer language, you can build a turing machine that will do the calculation. Likewise since any specific turing machine is easy to simulate given infinite memory, you can write a program that does what the TM does. This is called Turing Completeness.
Another interesting result from analyzing TMs is the existence of a Universal Turing Machine which is a specific Turing Machine which takes in its tape the description of a TM X and the input I for that TM X and simulates X on I. This with a stupidly simple machine defined in terms of fixed states and transitions and a linear tape.
At the time, all devices, slide rules and computers were built for a specific problem. See bomb sight, the Bombe, torpedo solution solvers, etc. The insight that you can build a generic device that simulates any other device given its description as data is the thing that started computing as we know it.
Then there is the Church-Turing Hypothesis which is that any possible computational device can be simulated by a TM. It has held up so far. On top of that there is the study of incomputability, which are problems that cannot be solved by any TM and there cannot be solved by any computer program.
TFA is a proof that this specific TM with 2 states and 3 possible colors on each spot of its infinite tape can simulate any other TM encoded on the tape using those three colors.
I still have to RTFA, but I'm curious as to how they claim that this is a Turing Machine without having a halt state. If their halting condition is simple you could make a real TM with just one more color or state, but that remains to be seen. But otherwise it's interesting to see.
Became depressed because of: - Estrogen treatment: gained weight, physical changes, possibly psychological changes too. - Lost his security clearance so couldn't work on any of the crypto/high security work he did. (spies usually tried to subvert homosexual and/or prosecuted people who were dissatisfied with their government). Half of that work couldn't be published either which left him in a bad position as an academic. - "most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits." as the GP said. Guess which habits this means
Probably caused a lot of rifts in his personal life too.
BTW, the inspiration for Apple computers' logo was actually Newton's apple. Older logos have a picture of Newton sitting under a tree with a glowing apple above him. It is unknown how much Turing influenced it. People often mention the rainbow apple in this regard.
But just to put things in perspective, the energy required to lift your 1000 kg car once is roughly equivalent to leaving a 100 W light bulb lit for 81 mins. Surprisingly modest, actually. You might want to double or triple that, as someone who has that much money to spend probably has an SUV.
Which makes me wonder, Skyscrapers are built to hold up a certain weight per floor. How much bigger do the columns have to be to hold up an extra 4 tons per apartment? You'd be better off dedicating the first few floors to garages instead.
Besides you have to worry about running the engine inside the building (ventilation), and you get a garage rather than a third room, plus you lose the floorspace for the elevator on every floor (though I guess it doubles as a freight elevator).
And I don't want to imagine the pain of an elevator breakdown...
Well, let's begin with the most boring and basic details. We're hosted at a Savvis data center in the Bay Area. Do you ever worry that a big earthquake will hit and your datacenter goes offline? Do you at least keep an offsite backup? First rule of offsite backups: Never talk about your offsite backups. Second rule of offsite backups: Never talk about where you keep your offsite backups.
You thought I was going somewhere else with that didn't you?
In all seriousness, that sounds like it would be in the software article instead.
I hope so, because that's where I like to keep my swap partition. Actually, that's not necessarily optimal. If you were reading a file on the inner edge and get a page fault, the disk will have to do a full seek all the way to the other side to be able to get the page. You're better off putting the page file halfway between the inner and outer edges to lower the average length of your seeks for page faults. Of course, that depends on how much thrashing you're experiencing and how much file access is mixed in with that, so YMMV
IIRC, NTFS has some of its main data structures in the middle of the partition for that reason.
It would be possible for some bored hacker to take the NVIDIA binary blobs and make a userspace driver from them. So?
Honest question. It's been tied before and abandoned.
Windows NT 3.0 had a userspace GUI subsystem including, IIRC, part or the driver. The idea was that if GDI or the driver crashed, it wouldn't bring down the whole system. Windows NT 4.0 abandoned this (it might have been NT 3.51). Why? Because having the GUI crash made the system unusable anyway so it wasn't worth the performance penalty.
Now imagine if you had a userspace NVidia driver. You got X running with 20 different applications. 3 important documents on OOo, pieces of code in your Emacs or Eclipse, a bunch of reference pages on Firefox, whatever. The most important thing to you is that your computer doesn't crash.
Now suddenly the video driver craps out. This will kill the X server, which in turn kills all the apps. At best you gave the apps the chance to save their recovery data, which they are keeping anyway. You lost your data, but your system is still up... yay?
So you've gone from crash and reboot, to crash and reboot the X Server, which is just a time saver. Maybe a little less corruption on your file system, but the difference is negligible.
Even worse, the driver crash might leave your video card in a state where you need a reboot to get it to restart. So on a driver crash you have to run a shutdown script anyway. You mght not even get a textmode terminal. Yes, you might get the chance to connect remotely and save a couple things, but you likely won't.
As an aside, one of the nicest features of Windows right now that I haven't seen on X is the ability to connect remotely to a local session and back. You can use X remotely but the session can't be moved. If X included session redirection by default then a driver crash wouldn't be such a big deal since you could bring up all your old apps anyway on a new X server(assuming th driver can restart the video card correctly, of course). And I doubt anyone will suggest always running under VNC.
Slashdot Mirror
And then 5 seconds later the worm du jour will root the box with the exact same vulnerability as last time because, you guessed it, a read only OS cannot be patched.
Granted, this distro won't have any servers running on it, but you'll have skype, firefox, IM, all running the exact same widely distributed version. You can bet exploit writers will target those versions very hard.
So, yeah, trust it for banking, but only for about a month after they are released. After that, install a desktop linux and keep it patched.
Jacard Loom cards are data, not code.
A nitpicking distinction, I know, but at least Babbage's machines had branch instructions.
Speaking of which, there are two replicas (originals?) of Babbage's Analytical Engine which actually work and are demonstrated with their original algorithms.
I remember reading somewhere that the museums sell list of primes calculated by the machine, with Ada's original code, but I can't find the link right now. (Or was it roots of a polynomial?)
Those would certainly count as the oldest program still running, but I can't find more info on the program being demonstrated ATM.
Maybe NASA is quietly working on this whole thing after all?
Also, FYI, there's more to rendezvous than just being up there while the asteroid passes by, you also have to match speeds, which isn't easy given the speed with which Apophys will pass by, so orbiter/landers are right out. A more likely mission profile would be:
- Launch from earth at some point around 2027, but on a powered orbit that goes lower on the gravity well and that intersects with Apophis on the far side of the solar system (big boom over there)
- Launch around 2018 and accelerate away from earth so that Apophis eventually catches up after 2027
- Put up a lot of tons of something in high earth orbit to hit Apophis as it passes by on 2027, dropping it into a lower orbit.
Also, nukes in space are overrated. On earth they heat up the air to make it expand into a blastwave. In space you'd have to spray water around to get the same effect (Or drill down, but that too much of a cliche).
The buggy code would run on user mode, not kernel mode. The only way to compromise a system with this security hole would be to have the sysadmin install a 4.3-compiled daemon running as root or a 4.3-compiled suid root program on an older kernel. A user can copy a 4.3-compiled program to his home directory, but all he'll get is a crashing program.
Yes, another variable to worry about when upgrading compilers and kernels, but not as easy as you make it sound.
Windows does not have signal handlers natively. (or actually, only a few now that I google it:SIGABRT, SIGFPE, SIGILL, SIGINT, SIGSEGV, SIGTERM) There is the whole SEH C-language exceptions which take over some of the uses, but no other signals natively. So you won't write a signal handler that gets called on a timer.
Full signals for GCC-compiled programs would be implemented by Cygwin which should give you timer signals and so on. Since the standard way to upgrade GCC under cygwin is to use the cygwin upgrade/package manager, they can just make the new GCC package depend on an updated cygwin DLL which could set the correct flag for you in a thunk before passing on the signal.
Don't bother trying to compile GCC yourself under cygwin, it's quite painful. Or at least time-consuming, the slower process spawning makes configure take an hour or more last time I tried it a few years ago. And then you have to wait for make bootstrap to finish.
Then again, MS isn't notorious for following standards. If this does show up under windows (say when starting an SEH handler) they'll just say that that's the windows ABI and ignore it.
Hell, it might even be different under win98/XP/Vista, as they are different kernel.
I was thinking about it this weekend, and realized MS wouldn't even need to release a whole new console.
The PS3 is being helped along by the fact that it's a cheap Blu ray player.
If in the next couple of months, blu-ray comes up on top, MS could just release an XBox Blu, with a hard drive and blu ray drive, but the exact same internals, guaranteeing compatibility. MS already produces a bunch of different editions of the XBox anyway. Release a blu-ray addon for older customers to use instead of the HDDVD one and you're good to go. This both assume, of course, that the expansion bus for the HDDVD drive has enough bandwidth.
You can ensure developer support simply by allowing them to assume the existence of a hard drive for bluray titles (make sure the addon has one).
Customers will like it because it's still cheaper than a PS3, specially if you already have an XBox. The game library is also a great upside.
The problem with the PS3 is going to be timing. As you mention, the PS3 is just now coming to a good state. By December we should expect great games for the PS3 as the developers begin to actually understand the hardware. If nothing else changed, the PS3 might take over the game industry.
The problem, as I mentioned, is timing. Let's say MS settled for a 4-year iteration on the XBox. That would mean that by November they'd be announcing the new Xbox (say XBox 3), to be released by December 2009. It would include (making it up, but not far fetched) Hi-Def, wii-style controllers, BD/HD-DVD drive (whichever wins out), some 6 cores as opposed to the PS3's 1 core+6 DSPs and a normal architecture that won't take your developers years to come to grips to and makes multiplatform games easier to develop, plus full backward compatibility.
Oh, and add interoperability with MS Surface and a MS multitouch phone as a handheld gaming platform. (ok, more far-fetched now)
Come December 2008, would you buy a PS3, which Sony always stated should last for 10 years, or wait around for the next Xbox? If you were a developer, being approached by MS for support this year, what platform would you focus on developing for? If you were developing next year?
Heck, even if MS announces they'd have the new version in 2010, the PS3 would still be in trouble.
It's interesting at least. Things to check:
-Is it statistically significant (seems like it, a large percentage of voters probably participated)
-Is it normal historically (You'd need to pull the numbers from the last primaries to see if they are homogeneous or not). Has NH been redistricted since the last election?
Maybe the richer districts have voting machines and vote for Clinton or some such. Plus with gerrymandering voting districts might be split across political issues anyway.
You'd probably have to do an ANOVA with spread from average against voting mode and year.
After all correlation does not equal causation.
Yes, but isn't that the point he's making?
.doc, MS has the whole market. With ODF, customers get a choice: They can go with MS or with Arjen's company.
With
If MS Office is the best solution then nothing changes, but if a dutch company can offer anything better (better pricing, support, features, localization, etc.) customers suddenly have a choice they didn't have before. Notice that this move would allow office to coexist with other apps, unlike other countries that mandate open source solutions.
Just because it benefits Dutch people (industry and users) doesn't mean it's a bad law.
Heck, for a politician, even without kickbacks, it's a reasonable thing to do, just from a trade-deficit and job-creation point of view. Should the government send money to a foreign company (MS) for the exact same solution produced locally, or should they spend locally and also create jobs?
This isn't even protectionist (unless they add import taxes). This is just leveling the playing field. Technically, MS can keep competing with local companies anyway.
The two disasters were warned against by NASA owns personnel, had the managers listened to their rocket-scientists then those 'accidents' would not have happened.
Excuse me? The rocket boosters were warned against, but the piece of foam was studied by NASA's engineers, ran two simulations on it, and the engineers studying it decided it was safe to reenter.There were some comments by other people at NASA about "what about the foam" a couple days before landing, and a "why are you bringing this up now and not last week" somewhere in there, but the study was done.
Granted, the study was flawed, but it was not a management decision. It was sad watching the press conferences after the events with all but the CNN reporter trying to imply that there was some gross negligence to blame.
(Or would you prefer they had decided to let the astronauts die of starvation in orbit rather than risk a reentry they thought was safe?)
It used to be that TV shows would get dumbed down or junk the shark to appeal to a wider variety of people. Now instead you see more and more spinoffs. They leverage the skill and some of the familiarity of the old show to create a new show that appeals to a different group, or to get more views to what could in some ways be "the same show".
If slashdot wants to grow I hope they do it by setting up sister sites instead. They have the experience, code and hardware to set up sister sites for different audiences. Maybe something as simple as spinning off politics and YRO, with more politically savvy editors. Maybe doing joint stories with AnimeFu, to liven things up. Maybe setting up a digg-wannabe site, with a slash-style discussions. You could try out (marked) slashvertisements on other sites and see how people react while the mother-site stays the same (since you already know
Or work with a social networking site to connect user profiles, journals and discussions together with all their other features (if the users choose to).
Of course, you'd have to help these sites grow. Joint stories, publishing selected top stories on each other's front page, ads back and forth, advice to the editors of the new sites, etc. Growing while keeping the original community alive and safe, but leveraging the experience of your old admins.
The styles of the sites should diverge, and some sites will sell off more than others. Some sites will use more AJAX, more pictures, more OMG ponies, more whatever. Rob knows already what this community needs. Start another site and figure what their community needs. It's a lot easier to do this for
If I put up an article on "Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online" which describes a site with a single stick figure webcomic that I updated six months ago, then the article should be considered garbage and rightfully go for speedy deletion. Nobody wants this kind of useless garbage polluting all the searches on wikipedia, plus it detracts from the more professional look of the site (compare to everything2)
/.ed but there were some long live ones IIRC)
The problem comes in when someone nominates for speedy deletion an article on a website which has clearly been regularly updated for years and has an active fanbase. Not only is this a request for cleanup but it is also a slap in the face as you're put in the same category as the Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online. (unfortunately I don't have the list of deleted webcomic and the site is
I'd suggest that any web site that has been online and regularly updated for a year cannot be speedily deleted.
Another suggestion is to, instead of deleting, move them to a webcomic wiki.
But in the end, wikipedia has articles on every single pokemon. I'd consider webcomics more interesting than that.
Wrong.
I'm sitting in front of an LCD right now. If I lean in I can see the pixels (1280x1024 17" screen). I see columns red green and blue, separate pixels from each.
Yes, each green pixel is made by putting in a green filter (subtracting all but the green) but that's not what additive/subtractive means in this case.
Color is mixed in an additive process, whereby your eye optically blurs out adjacent pixels and then the colors from the different pixels are mixed. If you want white you light up the individual pixels, which creates three very bright dots of different colors, which are then added to create white. The fact that mechanically you light up the pixels by diasabling their absortion is of no interest to the discussions.
Paints are substractive, for example.
Not quite right.
"Turing Machines" are a language.
A Turing Machine is a program.
A Universal Turing Machine is an interpreter for the language of Turing machines and can therefore do anything any TM can given appropriate inputs.
"Turing machines" are devices that can perform computations. They are very simple, a bunch of states and transitions, plus a tape (not going into the format here).
A specific Turing Machine is a certain configuration, with a defined set of states and transitions. These can be fashioned to perform a calculation on the string the tape is filled with before the machine starts. The result would be on the tape when the mahcine stops (WOLOG). For example, you can make a TM that tells you whether an imput number is even, or prime, etc.
Since TMs are so simple, it is possible to use them in proofs. For example, for any calculation you can program in any computer language, you can build a turing machine that will do the calculation. Likewise since any specific turing machine is easy to simulate given infinite memory, you can write a program that does what the TM does. This is called Turing Completeness.
Another interesting result from analyzing TMs is the existence of a Universal Turing Machine which is a specific Turing Machine which takes in its tape the description of a TM X and the input I for that TM X and simulates X on I. This with a stupidly simple machine defined in terms of fixed states and transitions and a linear tape.
At the time, all devices, slide rules and computers were built for a specific problem. See bomb sight, the Bombe, torpedo solution solvers, etc. The insight that you can build a generic device that simulates any other device given its description as data is the thing that started computing as we know it.
Then there is the Church-Turing Hypothesis which is that any possible computational device can be simulated by a TM. It has held up so far. On top of that there is the study of incomputability, which are problems that cannot be solved by any TM and there cannot be solved by any computer program.
TFA is a proof that this specific TM with 2 states and 3 possible colors on each spot of its infinite tape can simulate any other TM encoded on the tape using those three colors.
I still have to RTFA, but I'm curious as to how they claim that this is a Turing Machine without having a halt state. If their halting condition is simple you could make a real TM with just one more color or state, but that remains to be seen. But otherwise it's interesting to see.
Became depressed because of:
- Estrogen treatment: gained weight, physical changes, possibly psychological changes too.
- Lost his security clearance so couldn't work on any of the crypto/high security work he did. (spies usually tried to subvert homosexual and/or prosecuted people who were dissatisfied with their government). Half of that work couldn't be published either which left him in a bad position as an academic.
- "most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits." as the GP said. Guess which habits this means
Probably caused a lot of rifts in his personal life too.
BTW, the inspiration for Apple computers' logo was actually Newton's apple. Older logos have a picture of Newton sitting under a tree with a glowing apple above him. It is unknown how much Turing influenced it. People often mention the rainbow apple in this regard.
Which makes me wonder, Skyscrapers are built to hold up a certain weight per floor. How much bigger do the columns have to be to hold up an extra 4 tons per apartment? You'd be better off dedicating the first few floors to garages instead.
Besides you have to worry about running the engine inside the building (ventilation), and you get a garage rather than a third room, plus you lose the floorspace for the elevator on every floor (though I guess it doubles as a freight elevator).
And I don't want to imagine the pain of an elevator breakdown...
Second rule of offsite backups: Never talk about where you keep your offsite backups.
You thought I was going somewhere else with that didn't you?
In all seriousness, that sounds like it would be in the software article instead.
Don't you need it to die and get it fixed under warranty for that to work?
I wonder if they can issue a ballot to drop OOXML altogether, or delay its consideration until all outstanding ballots are resolved.
If that turns out to be the only ballot responded they would have a much better case.
I hope so, because that's where I like to keep my swap partition. Actually, that's not necessarily optimal. If you were reading a file on the inner edge and get a page fault, the disk will have to do a full seek all the way to the other side to be able to get the page. You're better off putting the page file halfway between the inner and outer edges to lower the average length of your seeks for page faults. Of course, that depends on how much thrashing you're experiencing and how much file access is mixed in with that, so YMMV
IIRC, NTFS has some of its main data structures in the middle of the partition for that reason.
Honest question. It's been tied before and abandoned.
Windows NT 3.0 had a userspace GUI subsystem including, IIRC, part or the driver. The idea was that if GDI or the driver crashed, it wouldn't bring down the whole system. Windows NT 4.0 abandoned this (it might have been NT 3.51). Why? Because having the GUI crash made the system unusable anyway so it wasn't worth the performance penalty.
Now imagine if you had a userspace NVidia driver. You got X running with 20 different applications. 3 important documents on OOo, pieces of code in your Emacs or Eclipse, a bunch of reference pages on Firefox, whatever. The most important thing to you is that your computer doesn't crash.
Now suddenly the video driver craps out. This will kill the X server, which in turn kills all the apps. At best you gave the apps the chance to save their recovery data, which they are keeping anyway. You lost your data, but your system is still up
So you've gone from crash and reboot, to crash and reboot the X Server, which is just a time saver. Maybe a little less corruption on your file system, but the difference is negligible.
Even worse, the driver crash might leave your video card in a state where you need a reboot to get it to restart. So on a driver crash you have to run a shutdown script anyway. You mght not even get a textmode terminal. Yes, you might get the chance to connect remotely and save a couple things, but you likely won't.
As an aside, one of the nicest features of Windows right now that I haven't seen on X is the ability to connect remotely to a local session and back. You can use X remotely but the session can't be moved. If X included session redirection by default then a driver crash wouldn't be such a big deal since you could bring up all your old apps anyway on a new X server(assuming th driver can restart the video card correctly, of course). And I doubt anyone will suggest always running under VNC.
(Sorry, couldn't help it)