Redundancy is expensive. Where it's feasible: fine; but it would be in our interest to support "cheap" solutions.
We should encourage services not to require external connections. There's no good reason a cell tower can't connect two phones in it's radius, nor normal phones inside the network can't call each other even when the outside line fails.
Legislation might help here; this can't be a commercial priority, after all (unless you want to hold the telecom provider responsible for the avoidable parts of the outage, which will just lead to never-ending court-cases should such an liability ever stand - and raise the cost of doing business quite a bit).
So while I'm all for redundancy, the cost of failure would go down many fold if as much as possible non-local aspects would be regarded as unreliable in the basic design.
Top-down (add redundancy) and bottom-up (design for failure) approaches can work together.
Personally I'm in favor of legalisation in combination with heavy regulation and especially taxation.
Regulation should ensure that advertising and addiction aren't needlessly encouraged, and taxation is a damn cheap and easily enforceable general discouragement. Regulation is already particularly heavy (concerning alcohol and tobacco), no worries there.
The distribution of ages in the population has shifted towards older ages. It's pretty continuous, so for any age (except 0), you'll find that the percentage of people at least that old has risen.
Sure, there are some weird bumps here and there depending on where you live, but nothing which would vindicate your position.
Indeed, this is a non-story. The page still asserts that he's in favor of net neutrality. It looks like it's been edited; some new material was added and old material shortened to compensate.
There's no dramatic front-page worthy change of direction indicated.
Frankly, I think he should include a page on the details of various plans where possible, but the linked page is not that page. It's too long as is!
It's fully managed nature is merely one of the interesting aspects. The static verification, and the notable lack of hardware memory mapping and so-called "protected mode" are also very interesting, since they might allow running it on simpler, faster chips, and in a more secure way. The projects kernel design itself is also interesting.
Jnode etc. are only superficially similar. Their aims are very different, and the result isn't really comparable. JNode is meant to run existing programs in a focused Java environment, whereas Singularity is intended to explore what OS's might do were we to start from scratch. Notably, Singularity won't run any normal current C# program which use certain non-verifiable calls.
And you never know, some aspects might even turn out to be useful - perhaps not in a new OS, but in a super-safe VM for untrusted programs? Who knows, and that's the point, it's research, not development.
Semantics are difficult. XML does not solve semantic issues like what tags mean. Be happy if your RSS provider provides syntactically valid XML - at least you can unambiguously interpret the structure of the document now!
As to semantics, if you're trying to interpret such a home-grown format as atom/rss, without reference implementation (and most specifically without a good test), your problems lie not with XML, but with that spec.
And indeed, RSS and atom aren't very good in that sense. It may be hard to make a spec and reference implementation, but it's worth its weight in gold ten times over if you've got them.
I use it in web development constantly, and have for about 8 years. It's great for documents mostly since it's much easier to process than a home-grown set up.
You want to transform the document, you can use any of a number of techniques, and trivially guarantee that the resulting document is at least syntactically valid. If you use a home-grown format (or HTML), you'll need to resort to regular expressions, or a custom parser - which works fine up to a point. Regex's are error prone (it's quite difficult, for instance, to make an untrusted HTML document safe with regex'es), and parsing is difficult, and doesn't solve the transformation step very elegantly - wheras XPath and others are absolutely brilliant for quickly distilling the stuff you need from a document.
But on the parsing side... take a look at ANTLR, it's just great:-).
It's technically not an IE hole, but an outlook issue. So if you don't have outlook [installed and configured correctly], you aren't vulnerable. Why IE7 permits access to external protocol handlers without asking is another issue...
I bought a canon i560 a while back for a lot less than 200$ and including glossy photo paper my cost per page is more like 25 eurocents -including wastage and problems (I bought the 200 gram per square meter glossy photo paper at the discount retailer ALDI for 11 eurocents an A4 page) and the photoprintquality is outstanding; I have a whole wall plastered in photo's and most people don't notice they're not actually real photo's even when inspecting them up close. The resolution (both DPI and achievable PPI) is absolutely phenomenal and effect. Despite covering a wall with photo's (2 by 4 meters) I don't think my total print costs have even reached 200$.
If you're printing a lot of photo's inkjet is definitely the way to go. it is far far cheaper at comparable quality than anything else out there.
My only complaint with my (low end model) is that the black level in color mode could be darker, and that it's irritating this printer driver won't let me print in color separations to let me fix it myself by using the text-black (the gamut is otherwise surprisingly wide). However judging from the newer models Pixma iP-somethingthousand in which even most lowerend models use a photo-black that problem is gone.
Finally please consider not buying HP if you want high quality and a low low price! my ink cartiges cost less than 5 euro's per color and 9 for black, and noname brand for half (in an online shop I order them at), and they're larger that the HP sizes to boot, and separately replaceable...
Uhm... What kind of mumbo jumbo is that? Of course they don't have the right to seize your stuff just because they want their property back! It is, after all, a personal laptop... On the other hand, Chip doesn't have a right to keep the source - however, if there is a difference of opinion in that matter; that's for civil courts; not some sort of surreal grab what you can with police support action. This judge is apparantly not very well informed when it comes to technical issues.
It's really dubious that they're even allowed to fire him on such short notice; so this action definitely stinky... it's as if they're taking whatever actions they can to legally fire him on the spot and sink his ship as soon as possible.
That's unethical. It's also pretty unethical to not talk with him first. That's just pretty human-to-human standard, to first talk about any differences you may have.
It's possible they're intentionally keeping the legal situation as complex as possible to prevent him from having a chance. If they're really worried about the claimed source code leak, that makes no sense. Whatever the case; that too is fairly unethical.
So pretty much whatever the background is of their allegations - it's obvious they couldn't have any real evidence (a hypothetical source code leak which they're not sure exists is certainly not traceable to a particular user as all users get the same CVS code), and it's obvious they're generally being assholes just to make it hard for him to win the case - instead of focussing on their business; which they should be.
Your argument boils down to the claim that the imitation SSE2 is functionally different from the intel SSE2. This makes sense to consider, given the nature of standards such as html and how buggy those implementations are and/or how differently they react to the same input.
However, in this case, the behaviour is as good as identical; which the trivial cave-at that obviously proc identification functions aren't the same (but those aren't the same across intel chips either), and that the instruction timings differ (but again those aren't the same across intel chips either!).
This doesn't necessarily imply maliciousness on intels part though - they could be plain stupid and have coded the library so it only runs on known procs (i.e. then it wouldn't run on new intels either). Or they have a separate code path for each chip (unlikely; again this isn't future compatible). Most likely, it is intentional. They probably consider IPP a value-add for their processor customers. However, that's still pretty nasty.
Your comment is completely off base on multiple counts. Instead of merely ranting let's participate in a more rational, useful diologue...
It's not a black and white question of life or death we're dealing with here. Increased airport screening doesn't actually increase your life expectancy very directly. It might (but might not) decrease the chance of attacks. However, that's not an easy game; society is large and there are a multitude of ways in which to be disruptive! Just because it's marginally harder to sneak certain items on a plane (and quite frankly checks are already quite thorough) doesn't magically prevent loss of life. These measures don't save thousands of lives, they shift some probabilities - perhaps - away from this particular means of death. Now isn't that great.
However, you're far more likely to die of a heart attack than a terrorist attack. As it so happens, getting so worked up isn't going to help your chances with the first killer, and probably won't help very much with the second. Stressing out the entire country with this huge paranoia isn't the solution. It's not that he current administration's efforts to save their populace are illegitimate, rather, they're misguided. You may sneer at various mundane causes of death, and trumpet bravery; but bravery's place is in a real war in which war's violence is a great threat.
Is your bravery going to help your neighbors?
In our hollywood-ized, fast-action, 3-2-1 cut to commercials world it's no surprise terrorism, and fear thereof sells so well. It's a fast killer after all, and although slow killers are slightly more effective (Top 15 Leading Causes of Death in the U.S., 2001), they're just so boring.
But please; let's not get carried away with this fast action addiction. In reality, you're more likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by others.
Quality of life is an important thing too. We should concentrate on building a nation on trust, comeraderie, and good sense instead of paranoia.
Frankly, I wouldn't seriously consider and large coding task without a good IDE, and VS.NET (esp the new 2.0 version) is about as good as it gets. Autocompletion is a real time saver for all those handy functions you rarely use - and even a vehicle of discovery: After pressing the dot, I've occasionally noticed a method I really wouldn't have thought of using otherwise. The inline debugger you can use in mid-HTTP transmission (even on browsers other than IE...) is quite useful for quickly getting a grasp on which particular thought twist is causing the latest bug, and of course integrated help on the class library is pretty much a must IMHO. I also use XSLT extensively, and the new version even supports Intellisense and debugging on XSLT...
It'll parse the compiler output and cross-reference the compile errors in your code, do some simple refactoring, find all references of a symbol, perform project wide regular expression searches, let's you jump directly to the declaration of a variable etc etc etc.
There's hundreds if not thousands of features I haven't named yet, most all of which are potentially useful, and which usually you can disable if you don't need em (say like the database browser for non-database apps)
I've played with eclipse too, but currently I'm not in the java game, but eclipse supports a boatload of similar features, as does borland's JBuilder.
So really - why in the world would you choose NOT to use an IDE?
The only real reason I can think of is that it does take a bit of a learning curve to actually be able to use productively precisely because of the overwhelming number of features...
IIRC Microsoft did (originally) use the BSD TCP/IP implementation to write their own - behavioural analysis confirmed this. This is completely legal, and ethically sound too... (given the BSD lisence and the BSD spirit).
I'll bet the TCP/IP implementation has since changed a lot however, and probably even has been completely rewritten...
some reference: http://austinlug.org/archives/alg/2002 -05/msg00606.html http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;si d=2001/ 6/19/05641/7357
You put the mess so nicely in frame:-) What's sort of an interesting side to this is the way the EU is developing; there too can one see processes developing that try to leave individual states intact while still trying to elect a central government... I'm curious what the future holds there - will there be a gerry-mandered, inconsistant voting process in a new country in 25 years? Or will this problem actually be solved...?
Elections would be hilarious if they weren't so bloody sad.
You're wrong, and your post is misleadingly off-topic to the post you're replying to (about the voting experience a la Venezuela), and I think you misunderstand the use of a democracy.
Wrong because:
There is no reason an anonymous voting process should fail to certify voter validity. Voters themselves are NOT anonymous; rather what they vote is... Yes, that's not perfect: this means for instance you could "maliciously" influence elections by discouraging some people to vote and helping others. Not only is this accepted in the countries I'm familiar with; that's actually pretty publicly practiced (at least they way I see it).
Misleadingly off-topic because:
You suggest that organizing an election is so difficult it's not realistic to expect any better. Even though I don't doubt that organizing an election to everyone's satisfaction is no mean feat; it certainly is possible: Not just does Venezuela succeed; most European countries succeed perfectly fine too, and although I'm unfamiliar with an example, I'm willing to bet some others do to...
There is no real difficulty in requiring voting machines to have public, verifiable blueprints. There is a lot of hassle, but no technical problem in standardizing the voting process - If the Supreme Court rules against a recount on the grounds of the notion of equal treatment of voters, doesn't it seems ridiculous that the first count isn't even remotely equal?
You misunderstand the use of a democracy:
Frankly, I think you're looking at democracy and elections entirely too religiously... Democracy pretty much fails as a type of government...
- Elections don't guarantee any sort of optimum government. - They don't require the elected government to in any way actually do what they said they will do. - They don't require any sort of competency whatsoever. - People actually making the choice aren't actually competent to make that choice. You don't hire people based on the gut feeling of the guy next door, do you? - Elections are really expensive. Just think about that lost productivity, etc., in addition to the obvious costs of the process itself. - Elections are very coarse grained. You might choose an idiotic president just to get a good staff and party, or the other way around.
It's probably not realistic to expect any perfect government, so I'm not advocating anything else, but let's not over hype some sort of American dream democracy concept beyond what it's worth.
There is one thing that elections actually do really well (*hint* when done the Venezuelan way), and that's providing a trustworthy, verifiable, hard-to-tamper with means of distributing power. As a side bonus this "government" thing is actually supposed to do good things for "we the people":-). This discourages people from organizing totally useless things like violent revolutions and talk shows about election failures.
Just to clarify... the grandparent post about the Venezuelan election really was all about TRANSPARENCY, and ensuing benefits, and in comparison to other similar elections the American presidential elections are systematically a failure.
In conclusion:
Secret ballots don't guarantee the anonymity of the voters, but ensure a ballot's owner's identity remains secret; AMERICAN ELECTIONS COULD WORK BETTER; Democracy isn't perfect, it's transparent.
The slashdot story confuses copyrights, trademarks and patents: at issue is trademark infringement (or so it seems). Copyrights have nothing to do with the story, and the patent on rubiks cubes was only mentioned by the copycat manufacturer to clarify that the patent had expired.
Specifically, the trademark probably hasn't expired (in principle trademarks don't while you defend them); A rubiks cube (or anything similar) can't infringe upon copyright (unless you're crazy enough to consider it a medium for information).
I don't like whining about bad slashdot stories; but this really is poorly presented...
Simple, effective means of testing program to find bugs. I'm certainly sold on using this kind of program to test my code. Of course it's only the tip of the iceberg; similar tests should exist for css, javascript, images, http, ftp, etc. etc. etc.
I'm assuming you graphed that trend based on data collected at w3schools...
I doubt that's a representative sample of the web-browsing public;-)
Anyways, these kind of predictions become very much harder once the numbers are no longer small fractions of the total (The curves will necessarily level off at 100% market share - but perhaps much earlier, and you can't really tell in advance).
I don't believe firefox will pass IEs market share in april 2005. Maybe 2006 - maybe.
It is now possible to generate a bitstream that matches a given MD5 hash. It's recent news too... Some postings can be found here, and google is your friend:-).
All hash functions have collisions; that's not the point... It's extremely unlikely for one to occur non-maliciously. The MD5 collision found was only found after some trivial mathematics done as a matter of principle by your network card just to spite you (okay, just kidding). It's still perfectly fine to use MD5 to check the validity of your files for bit-errors. Then again, so is CRC32. I do have a question to anyone more knowledgeable in MD5's weakness: although MD5 can now be spoofed , it's not clear to me from reading the news - is it only directly applicable to messages of a certain type/length or to all messages?
Nope convertfs won't work... From the horses mouth:
To upgrade from reiserfs V3 to V4, use tar, or sponsor us to
write a convertfs.
The lkml posting is probably cached all kinds of places, but kerneltrap also reproduces it in full.
Then again, reiserfs v4 and v3 have nothing to do with each other (unlike ext2 and ext3 for instance), so there's no quick fix possible probably.
On the other hand - reiser4 is completely untested (compared to reiser v3 and jfs, xfs, ext2, heck even the wine-dll emulation layered ntfs writing driver...), so do yourself a favour and don't do anything quite so crazy as not just using it for a production machine but also trying to convert an existing system to it with 'smart' tricks... Give it a little while... or make a lot of backups...
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you're in a public place, shouting gibberish no one wants to hear is a nuisance - and fortunately, any right to do so isn't unlimited.
You don't have the unlimited right to free speech.
For that matter, particularly in the US, libel laws mean that even actually relevant and potentially "political" speech is often legally curtailed.
Who's to say what's nonsense, what's libel, and what is free speech? It's not black and white.
Redundancy is expensive. Where it's feasible: fine; but it would be in our interest to support "cheap" solutions.
We should encourage services not to require external connections. There's no good reason a cell tower can't connect two phones in it's radius, nor normal phones inside the network can't call each other even when the outside line fails.
Legislation might help here; this can't be a commercial priority, after all (unless you want to hold the telecom provider responsible for the avoidable parts of the outage, which will just lead to never-ending court-cases should such an liability ever stand - and raise the cost of doing business quite a bit).
So while I'm all for redundancy, the cost of failure would go down many fold if as much as possible non-local aspects would be regarded as unreliable in the basic design.
Top-down (add redundancy) and bottom-up (design for failure) approaches can work together.
Personally I'm in favor of legalisation in combination with heavy regulation and especially taxation.
Regulation should ensure that advertising and addiction aren't needlessly encouraged, and taxation is a damn cheap and easily enforceable general discouragement. Regulation is already particularly heavy (concerning alcohol and tobacco), no worries there.
The distribution of ages in the population has shifted towards older ages. It's pretty continuous, so for any age (except 0), you'll find that the percentage of people at least that old has risen.
Sure, there are some weird bumps here and there depending on where you live, but nothing which would vindicate your position.
Indeed, this is a non-story. The page still asserts that he's in favor of net neutrality. It looks like it's been edited; some new material was added and old material shortened to compensate.
There's no dramatic front-page worthy change of direction indicated.
Frankly, I think he should include a page on the details of various plans where possible, but the linked page is not that page. It's too long as is!
It's fully managed nature is merely one of the interesting aspects. The static verification, and the notable lack of hardware memory mapping and so-called "protected mode" are also very interesting, since they might allow running it on simpler, faster chips, and in a more secure way. The projects kernel design itself is also interesting.
Jnode etc. are only superficially similar. Their aims are very different, and the result isn't really comparable. JNode is meant to run existing programs in a focused Java environment, whereas Singularity is intended to explore what OS's might do were we to start from scratch. Notably, Singularity won't run any normal current C# program which use certain non-verifiable calls.
And you never know, some aspects might even turn out to be useful - perhaps not in a new OS, but in a super-safe VM for untrusted programs? Who knows, and that's the point, it's research, not development.
Semantics are difficult. XML does not solve semantic issues like what tags mean. Be happy if your RSS provider provides syntactically valid XML - at least you can unambiguously interpret the structure of the document now!
As to semantics, if you're trying to interpret such a home-grown format as atom/rss, without reference implementation (and most specifically without a good test), your problems lie not with XML, but with that spec.
And indeed, RSS and atom aren't very good in that sense. It may be hard to make a spec and reference implementation, but it's worth its weight in gold ten times over if you've got them.
I use it in web development constantly, and have for about 8 years. It's great for documents mostly since it's much easier to process than a home-grown set up.
:-).
You want to transform the document, you can use any of a number of techniques, and trivially guarantee that the resulting document is at least syntactically valid. If you use a home-grown format (or HTML), you'll need to resort to regular expressions, or a custom parser - which works fine up to a point. Regex's are error prone (it's quite difficult, for instance, to make an untrusted HTML document safe with regex'es), and parsing is difficult, and doesn't solve the transformation step very elegantly - wheras XPath and others are absolutely brilliant for quickly distilling the stuff you need from a document.
But on the parsing side... take a look at ANTLR, it's just great
It's technically not an IE hole, but an outlook issue. So if you don't have outlook [installed and configured correctly], you aren't vulnerable. Why IE7 permits access to external protocol handlers without asking is another issue...
I bought a canon i560 a while back for a lot less than 200$ and including glossy photo paper my cost per page is more like 25 eurocents -including wastage and problems (I bought the 200 gram per square meter glossy photo paper at the discount retailer ALDI for 11 eurocents an A4 page) and the photoprintquality is outstanding; I have a whole wall plastered in photo's and most people don't notice they're not actually real photo's even when inspecting them up close. The resolution (both DPI and achievable PPI) is absolutely phenomenal and effect. Despite covering a wall with photo's (2 by 4 meters) I don't think my total print costs have even reached 200$.
If you're printing a lot of photo's inkjet is definitely the way to go. it is far far cheaper at comparable quality than anything else out there.
My only complaint with my (low end model) is that the black level in color mode could be darker, and that it's irritating this printer driver won't let me print in color separations to let me fix it myself by using the text-black (the gamut is otherwise surprisingly wide). However judging from the newer models Pixma iP-somethingthousand in which even most lowerend models use a photo-black that problem is gone.
Finally please consider not buying HP if you want high quality and a low low price! my ink cartiges cost less than 5 euro's per color and 9 for black, and noname brand for half (in an online shop I order them at), and they're larger that the HP sizes to boot, and separately replaceable...
Uhm... What kind of mumbo jumbo is that? Of course they don't have the right to seize your stuff just because they want their property back! It is, after all, a personal laptop... On the other hand, Chip doesn't have a right to keep the source - however, if there is a difference of opinion in that matter; that's for civil courts; not some sort of surreal grab what you can with police support action. This judge is apparantly not very well informed when it comes to technical issues.
It's really dubious that they're even allowed to fire him on such short notice; so this action definitely stinky... it's as if they're taking whatever actions they can to legally fire him on the spot and sink his ship as soon as possible.
That's unethical. It's also pretty unethical to not talk with him first. That's just pretty human-to-human standard, to first talk about any differences you may have.
It's possible they're intentionally keeping the legal situation as complex as possible to prevent him from having a chance. If they're really worried about the claimed source code leak, that makes no sense. Whatever the case; that too is fairly unethical.
So pretty much whatever the background is of their allegations - it's obvious they couldn't have any real evidence (a hypothetical source code leak which they're not sure exists is certainly not traceable to a particular user as all users get the same CVS code), and it's obvious they're generally being assholes just to make it hard for him to win the case - instead of focussing on their business; which they should be.
--Eamon
Your argument boils down to the claim that the imitation SSE2 is functionally different from the intel SSE2. This makes sense to consider, given the nature of standards such as html and how buggy those implementations are and/or how differently they react to the same input.
However, in this case, the behaviour is as good as identical; which the trivial cave-at that obviously proc identification functions aren't the same (but those aren't the same across intel chips either), and that the instruction timings differ (but again those aren't the same across intel chips either!).
This doesn't necessarily imply maliciousness on intels part though - they could be plain stupid and have coded the library so it only runs on known procs (i.e. then it wouldn't run on new intels either). Or they have a separate code path for each chip (unlikely; again this isn't future compatible). Most likely, it is intentional. They probably consider IPP a value-add for their processor customers. However, that's still pretty nasty.
--Eamon
Your comment is completely off base on multiple counts. Instead of merely ranting let's participate in a more rational, useful diologue...
It's not a black and white question of life or death we're dealing with here. Increased airport screening doesn't actually increase your life expectancy very directly. It might (but might not) decrease the chance of attacks. However, that's not an easy game; society is large and there are a multitude of ways in which to be disruptive! Just because it's marginally harder to sneak certain items on a plane (and quite frankly checks are already quite thorough) doesn't magically prevent loss of life. These measures don't save thousands of lives, they shift some probabilities - perhaps - away from this particular means of death. Now isn't that great.
However, you're far more likely to die of a heart attack than a terrorist attack. As it so happens, getting so worked up isn't going to help your chances with the first killer, and probably won't help very much with the second. Stressing out the entire country with this huge paranoia isn't the solution. It's not that he current administration's efforts to save their populace are illegitimate, rather, they're misguided. You may sneer at various mundane causes of death, and trumpet bravery; but bravery's place is in a real war in which war's violence is a great threat.
Is your bravery going to help your neighbors?
In our hollywood-ized, fast-action, 3-2-1 cut to commercials world it's no surprise terrorism, and fear thereof sells so well. It's a fast killer after all, and although slow killers are slightly more effective (Top 15 Leading Causes of Death in the U.S., 2001), they're just so boring.
But please; let's not get carried away with this fast action addiction. In reality, you're more likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by others.
Quality of life is an important thing too. We should concentrate on building a nation on trust, comeraderie, and good sense instead of paranoia.
Frankly, I wouldn't seriously consider and large coding task without a good IDE, and VS.NET (esp the new 2.0 version) is about as good as it gets. Autocompletion is a real time saver for all those handy functions you rarely use - and even a vehicle of discovery: After pressing the dot, I've occasionally noticed a method I really wouldn't have thought of using otherwise. The inline debugger you can use in mid-HTTP transmission (even on browsers other than IE...) is quite useful for quickly getting a grasp on which particular thought twist is causing the latest bug, and of course integrated help on the class library is pretty much a must IMHO. I also use XSLT extensively, and the new version even supports Intellisense and debugging on XSLT...
It'll parse the compiler output and cross-reference the compile errors in your code, do some simple refactoring, find all references of a symbol, perform project wide regular expression searches, let's you jump directly to the declaration of a variable etc etc etc.
There's hundreds if not thousands of features I haven't named yet, most all of which are potentially useful, and which usually you can disable if you don't need em (say like the database browser for non-database apps)
I've played with eclipse too, but currently I'm not in the java game, but eclipse supports a boatload of similar features, as does borland's JBuilder.
So really - why in the world would you choose NOT to use an IDE?
The only real reason I can think of is that it does take a bit of a learning curve to actually be able to use productively precisely because of the overwhelming number of features...
IIRC Microsoft did (originally) use the BSD TCP/IP implementation to write their own - behavioural analysis confirmed this. This is completely legal, and ethically sound too... (given the BSD lisence and the BSD spirit).
2 -05/msg00606 .htmli d=2001/ 6/19/05641/7357
I'll bet the TCP/IP implementation has since changed a lot however, and probably even has been completely rewritten...
some reference:
http://austinlug.org/archives/alg/200
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;s
You put the mess so nicely in frame :-)
What's sort of an interesting side to this is the way the EU is developing; there too can one see processes developing that try to leave individual states intact while still trying to elect a central government... I'm curious what the future holds there - will there be a gerry-mandered, inconsistant voting process in a new country in 25 years? Or will this problem actually be solved...?
Elections would be hilarious if they weren't so bloody sad.
--Eamon
You're wrong, and your post is misleadingly off-topic to the post you're replying to (about the voting experience a la Venezuela), and I think you misunderstand the use of a democracy.
:-). This discourages people from organizing totally useless things like violent revolutions and talk shows about election failures.
Wrong because:
There is no reason an anonymous voting process should fail to certify voter validity. Voters themselves are NOT anonymous; rather what they vote is... Yes, that's not perfect: this means for instance you could "maliciously" influence elections by discouraging some people to vote and helping others. Not only is this accepted in the countries I'm familiar with; that's actually pretty publicly practiced (at least they way I see it).
Misleadingly off-topic because:
You suggest that organizing an election is so difficult it's not realistic to expect any better. Even though I don't doubt that organizing an election to everyone's satisfaction is no mean feat; it certainly is possible: Not just does Venezuela succeed; most European countries succeed perfectly fine too, and although I'm unfamiliar with an example, I'm willing to bet some others do to...
There is no real difficulty in requiring voting machines to have public, verifiable blueprints. There is a lot of hassle, but no technical problem in standardizing the voting process - If the Supreme Court rules against a recount on the grounds of the notion of equal treatment of voters, doesn't it seems ridiculous that the first count isn't even remotely equal?
You misunderstand the use of a democracy:
Frankly, I think you're looking at democracy and elections entirely too religiously... Democracy pretty much fails as a type of government...
- Elections don't guarantee any sort of optimum government.
- They don't require the elected government to in any way actually do what they said they will do.
- They don't require any sort of competency whatsoever.
- People actually making the choice aren't actually competent to make that choice. You don't hire people based on the gut feeling of the guy next door, do you?
- Elections are really expensive. Just think about that lost productivity, etc., in addition to the obvious costs of the process itself.
- Elections are very coarse grained. You might choose an idiotic president just to get a good staff and party, or the other way around.
It's probably not realistic to expect any perfect government, so I'm not advocating anything else, but let's not over hype some sort of American dream democracy concept beyond what it's worth.
There is one thing that elections actually do really well (*hint* when done the Venezuelan way), and that's providing a trustworthy, verifiable, hard-to-tamper with means of distributing power. As a side bonus this "government" thing is actually supposed to do good things for "we the people"
Just to clarify... the grandparent post about the Venezuelan election really was all about TRANSPARENCY, and ensuing benefits, and in comparison to other similar elections the American presidential elections are systematically a failure.
In conclusion:
Secret ballots don't guarantee the anonymity of the voters, but ensure a ballot's owner's identity remains secret; AMERICAN ELECTIONS COULD WORK BETTER; Democracy isn't perfect, it's transparent.
The slashdot story confuses copyrights, trademarks and patents: at issue is trademark infringement (or so it seems). Copyrights have nothing to do with the story, and the patent on rubiks cubes was only mentioned by the copycat manufacturer to clarify that the patent had expired.
Specifically, the trademark probably hasn't expired (in principle trademarks don't while you defend them); A rubiks cube (or anything similar) can't infringe upon copyright (unless you're crazy enough to consider it a medium for information).
I don't like whining about bad slashdot stories; but this really is poorly presented...
--Eamon
These kind of tools make a hacker proud :-).
Simple, effective means of testing program to find bugs. I'm certainly sold on using this kind of program to test my code. Of course it's only the tip of the iceberg; similar tests should exist for css, javascript, images, http, ftp, etc. etc. etc.
--Eamon
As he stated in the article; the crashes are sometimes platform-specific.
I've tried this in 1.0PR firefox on win32, and the crashes do occur there.
I've gotta say - this really looks like a great tool; a simple and effective way of finding some bugs!
--Eamon
I'm assuming you graphed that trend based on data collected at w3schools...
;-)
I doubt that's a representative sample of the web-browsing public
Anyways, these kind of predictions become very much harder once the numbers are no longer small fractions of the total (The curves will necessarily level off at 100% market share - but perhaps much earlier, and you can't really tell in advance).
I don't believe firefox will pass IEs market share in april 2005. Maybe 2006 - maybe.
--Eamon
It is now possible to generate a bitstream that matches a given MD5 hash. It's recent news too... :-).
Some postings can be found here, and google is your friend
--Eamon
All hash functions have collisions; that's not the point... It's extremely unlikely for one to occur non-maliciously. The MD5 collision found was only found after some trivial mathematics done as a matter of principle by your network card just to spite you (okay, just kidding).
It's still perfectly fine to use MD5 to check the validity of your files for bit-errors. Then again, so is CRC32.
I do have a question to anyone more knowledgeable in MD5's weakness: although MD5 can now be spoofed , it's not clear to me from reading the news - is it only directly applicable to messages of a certain type/length or to all messages?
Nope convertfs won't work... From the horses mouth:
To upgrade from reiserfs V3 to V4, use tar, or sponsor us to
write a convertfs.
The lkml posting is probably cached all kinds of places, but kerneltrap also reproduces it in full.
Then again, reiserfs v4 and v3 have nothing to do with each other (unlike ext2 and ext3 for instance), so there's no quick fix possible probably.
On the other hand - reiser4 is completely untested (compared to reiser v3 and jfs, xfs, ext2, heck even the wine-dll emulation layered ntfs writing driver...), so do yourself a favour and don't do anything quite so crazy as not just using it for a production machine but also trying to convert an existing system to it with 'smart' tricks... Give it a little while... or make a lot of backups...
Well, Mr. Reiser Dude suggests tar in his posting to lkml which can also be viewed on kerneltrap.org.
In other words,
no.