No, it took them 2.5 years to get from 2.16 to 2.18. Odd minor numbers are development releases. Besides, the slow cycle is being changed to a fast cycle; 2.20 this summer. RTFA.
Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3
We are?! I think maybe you meant to post this on some other site, perhaps WeenieGamerBore.net, or maybe WhoNeedsALifeWhenYouHaveAFastComputer.org.
FWIW, my day box is an 800 MHz P3 with 256 MB RAM. It has a Matrox G400, because I was playing with OpenGL for a while in 2001 (?), and a 120 GB disk, because the old disk died back in the spring. FreeBSD, of course. It can lift 234.765 sprongles in Swark 72. Until I got interested in OpenGL, my day box was a 486DX2-66 with 16 MB of RAM, which was also running as our company firewall and server (mail, web, and DNS). A great machine until the network card melted. FreeBSD, no X. Only 17.823 sprongles, though, so it's just as well I upgraded.
My home box is a ThinkPad R31 (Celeron 1.2 GHz, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB disk) with a dodgy battery.
We are exposed to far greater amounts of EM radiation from the sun, in all sorts of unfilitered frequencies. And we have been since before man really groked that it rose every day and set every night.
It's not far greater (or in fact greater at all) at cell phone frequencies;
it's not unfiltered; it's filtered very effectively by the atmosphere;
exactly because we have been exposed to the sun for more than three billion years, we have evolved to cope with that.
Regardless, the studies repeatedly demonstrate that there is a concrete effect. Either show us what is wrong with the studies or shut up. Saying "my model doesn't admit the possibility of an effect" is an unscientific response. Ether models didn't admit the possibility of the Michelson-Morley observations.
I'm sure after someone wins the X Prize they'll need someplace to stay the night.
After someone wins the X prize they will be back on the ground very soon, because the X prize is just for 100km altitude, not entering orbit. Entering orbit is very much harder (8 km/s delta-V instead of about 1 km/s). I dare say there will be follow-on competitions (such as the X Prize Cup) but it'll be quite a while before a privately-developed launcher makes it to orbit.
I strongly agree that a system with hand-marked paper ballots and open hand counting is greatly superior to any existing automated system, and as you say, it's almost certainly cheaper, and it can be arranged to provide final results in a few hours. However, you paint an overly rosy picture of our system in the UK. Abuses, including ballot box stuffing, can and probably do take place, and the "audit trail" which theoretically allows the security services to identify Communist voters, and has little other apparent purpose, is a shameful blot on the system.
6.8 kilograms, i.e. 15 pounds. Chapter 1 of the UCI rules (PDF), rule 1.3.019 (page 45). There are many other rules, including specifically that no technical innovation can be used unless it has been approved by the UCI Executive Committee. To get approval for an innovation you have to submit it to the UCI by 30th June for use from the 1st January of the following year (1.3.004, page 41). Technological change in the sport is tightly controlled.
We don't have to retrieve it just to put it in a museum. The Pioneer 10 museum will be there, at Pioneer 10, coasting along through interstellar space. A large museum will completely contain the probe, allow visitors to inspect the plaque and so on, without disturbing its mission in the slightest. The museum won't get many visitors, of course, and in practice its main function will be to provide a virtual Pioneer 10 to a sister museum located closer to home.
As I said in the comment to which you are responding, read Double Fold for much more on this. I don't have the time or inclination to repeat the details of all the hugely expensive and disastrously destructive "preservation" projects that Baker documents there. Yes, it is possible to scan (or photograph) books non-destructively, and to get good results. For all I know, the Yiddish project you identify is an example of such good practice, which I fully support. But the great majority of the books, newspapers, and journals "preserved" in the last fifty years have in fact been destroyed in the process, replaced at great cost by a shoddy partial copy with a shorter shelf-life.
Baker's remarks about contrast, colour, and greyscale are mostly for microfilm results, for which it is the normal deliberate decision to use very high-contrast film, hugely compressing the dynamic range of the original. Digital scans also usually lose much of the dynamic range, but are often not as appalling as microfilm. It has a lot to do with the technology chosen for scanning, and less to do with the size of the resulting images. Digital preservation projects usually scan in 8-bit greyscale at 600dpi, which is woefully inadequate, of course. And the results are often kept in proprietary formats in proprietary Document Management Systems.
That's all I'm going to say on the subject. Read the book.
those books will only last a few precious years of handling before they're lost forever.
This is almost certainly not the case. The idea that books turn to dust on the shelves is largely false. Even books printed on quite acidic paper will probably last for centuries (with typical research library handling frequency) if they are well looked after. If they are cut up and fed into scanners, they will then be thrown away. Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals). Also lost would be all the historical value inherent in the books as physical objects and in the collection as a whole.
The "slow fires" were invented by technocrat library managers as propaganda to generate funds for "preservation" projects. These huge projects have given the managers much power and prestige while destroying millions of volumes of irreplaceable books and newspapers. Read Double Fold (Nicholson Baker, Amazon)
for much more on this subject.
Now, the results don't mention average case (which is fine), but keep in mind with preempt-kernel it is much lower.
The results do mention the average latency. For the vanilla kernel it is 88.3 microseconds. For the low-latency patch it is 54.3 microseconds. For the preemption patch it is 52.9 microseconds. Is 52.9 much lower than 54.3?
To do this with an LED would require that the LED be actually driven by the data signal. Most of them go on at the start of the packet or byte and go off at the end, they don't go on for 1 and off for 0.
This is a great theory, but not actually true, at least for modems. Read the paper.
The LED's don't indicate the data pattern, just the transmission pattern.. You can't tell a 1 from a 0 by looking at the LEDs..
You didn't actually read the paper, did you? It turns out that the LEDs on modems actually do indicate the data pattern. Most modems have "Class III" LED emanations (i.e. "strongly correlated with the content of data being transmitted"). Most LAN and WAN equipment does not have Class III optical emissions, with the exception of an LED on the back panel of certain CISCO routers (page 11). See the table on page 10 of the paper.
In fact, they reconstruct actual data from actual modems over various distances ranging from 5 metres to 30 metres. They believe that, given the right optics, this could be done over several hundred metres.
They also found that the Paradyne Infolock 2811-11 DES encryptor has an LED on the plaintext data.
And they have a great appendix on using keyboard LEDs as a high-bandwidth covert channel, with the obligatory reference to Cryptonomicon.
the logger is only active while the modem is active
No. The logger is not active when the modem is active. That's one of the safeguards to prevent the logger from "recording electronic communications". Read the affidavit again.
It is true that both PostScript and PDF are proprietary formats (owned by Adobe), but it does not cost any money to generate documents in those formats. In fact, it can be done entirely with free software.
When you write a paper in LaTeX, how do you print it? It is very likely that you run LaTeX/TeX to create a DVI file, then dvips to convert the DVI to PostScript, which you then send to a printer. You could equally well run dvipdf to convert the DVI to PDF. Both dvips and dvipdf are free software. Converting TeX to PostScript and/or PDF with open-source tools is not only possible; it is a natural part of using TeX.
$ pkg_info -W/usr/local/bin/dvips /usr/local/bin/dvips was installed by package teTeX-1.0.7
$ pkg_info -W/usr/local/bin/dvipdf /usr/local/bin/dvipdf was installed by package ghostscript-5.50
Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well.
I suspect that Dr Spafford would agree with you. Whether or not a piece of software is open source is orthogonal to whether or not it can be trusted.
Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's been designed properly, and likely just because something is free doesn't mean it's been slapped together with duct tape.
Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's not open source.
It is widely known and understood that winners in almost every field have poor recollection of their past: the mistakes they made, the competitors who lost, their failed predictions. This happens because they don't have anyone to keep them honest. It's the same effect when great authors get mediocre after their fourth or fifth novel: there's no motivation for themselves or their editors to keep the quality up.
With that in mind, here are some notable examples from the Gates interview:
In 1974, it wasn't exceptional to predict a computer on every desk or in every home. Every technology pundit was doing it;
It is widely known that Paul Allen did most of the hard hacking in the early days;
There is nothing remarkable about a 12-year-old boy learning to program in six months, especially in the 1970s when there was nothing else you could do with a computer;
The Internet is 30 years old. Even I had an email account before he was using his car phone to go to the movies with his San Francisco girlfriend, so no way was it "before the Internet"
Microsoft did not invent, and was in fact very slow to pick up on:
handwriting recognition
speech recognition
the Internet
the web browser
email.
etc.
There is a huge amount of work and research going on into making machines intelligent. Look at any robotics or AI lab. Just because Microsoft isn't doing it doesn't mean it's not getting done.
Just because you have to pay support staff doesn't mean your software can't be free. Red Hat pays its support staff.
Absolutely correct. This boils down to the difference between being an engineer and being a cowboy.
The products of engineering are design documents. ChemicaL engineers produce designs for chemical plants, and then construct, or supervise the construction of, those plants according to the designs. Software engineers produce designs for software, and then construct, or supervise the construction of, that software according to the designs. If that is not what you are doing then you are not a software engineer.
What is it with Americans? How did "liberal" become an antonym to "capitalist"? Liberals are, pretty much, all capitalists. Ever heard of "liberal capitalism"? Capitalism is a taxon of a different order; it is in contrast to terms such as communism and anarchism, not liberalism.
I suggest you waste less time on slashdot and get yourself an education.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it took them 2.5 years to get from 2.16 to 2.18. Odd minor numbers are development releases. Besides, the slow cycle is being changed to a fast cycle; 2.20 this summer. RTFA.
Tanenbaum is a US citizen. Read the article.
One Mg of plutonium is plenty to kill all the grass in a field, and much else besides. Maybe you meant mg.
We are?! I think maybe you meant to post this on some other site, perhaps WeenieGamerBore.net, or maybe WhoNeedsALifeWhenYouHaveAFastComputer.org.
FWIW, my day box is an 800 MHz P3 with 256 MB RAM. It has a Matrox G400, because I was playing with OpenGL for a while in 2001 (?), and a 120 GB disk, because the old disk died back in the spring. FreeBSD, of course. It can lift 234.765 sprongles in Swark 72. Until I got interested in OpenGL, my day box was a 486DX2-66 with 16 MB of RAM, which was also running as our company firewall and server (mail, web, and DNS). A great machine until the network card melted. FreeBSD, no X. Only 17.823 sprongles, though, so it's just as well I upgraded.
My home box is a ThinkPad R31 (Celeron 1.2 GHz, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB disk) with a dodgy battery.
My other home box is an old iMac.
Regardless, the studies repeatedly demonstrate that there is a concrete effect. Either show us what is wrong with the studies or shut up. Saying "my model doesn't admit the possibility of an effect" is an unscientific response. Ether models didn't admit the possibility of the Michelson-Morley observations.
No, that would be Hobson's choice. A Hobbesian choice might be between anarchy and tyranny, or possibly deciding which snow goon to attack first.
After someone wins the X prize they will be back on the ground very soon, because the X prize is just for 100km altitude, not entering orbit. Entering orbit is very much harder (8 km/s delta-V instead of about 1 km/s). I dare say there will be follow-on competitions (such as the X Prize Cup) but it'll be quite a while before a privately-developed launcher makes it to orbit.
I strongly agree that a system with hand-marked paper ballots and open hand counting is greatly superior to any existing automated system, and as you say, it's almost certainly cheaper, and it can be arranged to provide final results in a few hours. However, you paint an overly rosy picture of our system in the UK. Abuses, including ballot box stuffing, can and probably do take place, and the "audit trail" which theoretically allows the security services to identify Communist voters, and has little other apparent purpose, is a shameful blot on the system.
Here.
6.8 kilograms, i.e. 15 pounds. Chapter 1 of the UCI rules (PDF), rule 1.3.019 (page 45). There are many other rules, including specifically that no technical innovation can be used unless it has been approved by the UCI Executive Committee. To get approval for an innovation you have to submit it to the UCI by 30th June for use from the 1st January of the following year (1.3.004, page 41). Technological change in the sport is tightly controlled.
We don't have to retrieve it just to put it in a museum. The Pioneer 10 museum will be there, at Pioneer 10, coasting along through interstellar space. A large museum will completely contain the probe, allow visitors to inspect the plaque and so on, without disturbing its mission in the slightest. The museum won't get many visitors, of course, and in practice its main function will be to provide a virtual Pioneer 10 to a sister museum located closer to home.
As I said in the comment to which you are responding, read Double Fold for much more on this. I don't have the time or inclination to repeat the details of all the hugely expensive and disastrously destructive "preservation" projects that Baker documents there. Yes, it is possible to scan (or photograph) books non-destructively, and to get good results. For all I know, the Yiddish project you identify is an example of such good practice, which I fully support. But the great majority of the books, newspapers, and journals "preserved" in the last fifty years have in fact been destroyed in the process, replaced at great cost by a shoddy partial copy with a shorter shelf-life.
Baker's remarks about contrast, colour, and greyscale are mostly for microfilm results, for which it is the normal deliberate decision to use very high-contrast film, hugely compressing the dynamic range of the original. Digital scans also usually lose much of the dynamic range, but are often not as appalling as microfilm. It has a lot to do with the technology chosen for scanning, and less to do with the size of the resulting images. Digital preservation projects usually scan in 8-bit greyscale at 600dpi, which is woefully inadequate, of course. And the results are often kept in proprietary formats in proprietary Document Management Systems.
That's all I'm going to say on the subject. Read the book.
This is almost certainly not the case. The idea that books turn to dust on the shelves is largely false. Even books printed on quite acidic paper will probably last for centuries (with typical research library handling frequency) if they are well looked after. If they are cut up and fed into scanners, they will then be thrown away. Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals). Also lost would be all the historical value inherent in the books as physical objects and in the collection as a whole.
The "slow fires" were invented by technocrat library managers as propaganda to generate funds for "preservation" projects. These huge projects have given the managers much power and prestige while destroying millions of volumes of irreplaceable books and newspapers. Read Double Fold (Nicholson Baker, Amazon) for much more on this subject.
The results do mention the average latency. For the vanilla kernel it is 88.3 microseconds. For the low-latency patch it is 54.3 microseconds. For the preemption patch it is 52.9 microseconds. Is 52.9 much lower than 54.3?
Read the paper.
This is a great theory, but not actually true, at least for modems. Read the paper.
You didn't actually read the paper, did you? It turns out that the LEDs on modems actually do indicate the data pattern. Most modems have "Class III" LED emanations (i.e. "strongly correlated with the content of data being transmitted"). Most LAN and WAN equipment does not have Class III optical emissions, with the exception of an LED on the back panel of certain CISCO routers (page 11). See the table on page 10 of the paper.
In fact, they reconstruct actual data from actual modems over various distances ranging from 5 metres to 30 metres. They believe that, given the right optics, this could be done over several hundred metres.
They also found that the Paradyne Infolock 2811-11 DES encryptor has an LED on the plaintext data.
And they have a great appendix on using keyboard LEDs as a high-bandwidth covert channel, with the obligatory reference to Cryptonomicon.
No. The logger is not active when the modem is active. That's one of the safeguards to prevent the logger from "recording electronic communications". Read the affidavit again.
It is true that both PostScript and PDF are proprietary formats (owned by Adobe), but it does not cost any money to generate documents in those formats. In fact, it can be done entirely with free software.
When you write a paper in LaTeX, how do you print it? It is very likely that you run LaTeX/TeX to create a DVI file, then dvips to convert the DVI to PostScript, which you then send to a printer. You could equally well run dvipdf to convert the DVI to PDF. Both dvips and dvipdf are free software. Converting TeX to PostScript and/or PDF with open-source tools is not only possible; it is a natural part of using TeX.
Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well.
I suspect that Dr Spafford would agree with you. Whether or not a piece of software is open source is orthogonal to whether or not it can be trusted.
Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's been designed properly, and likely just because something is free doesn't mean it's been slapped together with duct tape.
Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's not open source.
It is widely known and understood that winners in almost every field have poor recollection of their past: the mistakes they made, the competitors who lost, their failed predictions. This happens because they don't have anyone to keep them honest. It's the same effect when great authors get mediocre after their fourth or fifth novel: there's no motivation for themselves or their editors to keep the quality up.
With that in mind, here are some notable examples from the Gates interview:
Anyone who cannot write a good design document is not an engineer. A programmer, perhaps, but never an engineer.
Absolutely correct. This boils down to the difference between being an engineer and being a cowboy.
The products of engineering are design documents. ChemicaL engineers produce designs for chemical plants, and then construct, or supervise the construction of, those plants according to the designs. Software engineers produce designs for software, and then construct, or supervise the construction of, that software according to the designs. If that is not what you are doing then you are not a software engineer.
What is it with Americans? How did "liberal"
become an antonym to "capitalist"? Liberals
are, pretty much, all capitalists. Ever heard of
"liberal capitalism"? Capitalism is a taxon of
a different order; it is in contrast to
terms such as communism and anarchism, not
liberalism.
I suggest you waste less time on slashdot
and get yourself an education.
See The memory management reference for four separate definitions of "byte". It took us a while to get it down to four.