I liked the series, but thought the acting was bad. I actually liked the movie better. As a friend of mine pointed out, the movie is a poetic accompaniment to the book, not really something that can stand by itself. As a poetic accompaniment, it was excellent.
The series is a mediocre adaptation of the book to the screen. It doesn't appear to be a horrible adaptation, yet.
I'm not going to stop glibly saying that because I think it's in everybody's best interests to destroy the monopoly that produces the garbage that is Windows. This goal of monopoly destruction is well worth a temporarily slightly less than optimal solution to a particular problem. And whether or not it's slightly less than optimal is rather debatable IMHO. I think you're just afraid of a world without customer lock-in and propietary liscenses because you can't figure out how to make money by doing things other than stealing from the public domain and selling it to your customers.
This liscensing thing is a ridiculous abuse of the system on Microsoft's part. People should abandon this liscensing scheme. I'm happy this is being so well publicized so people truly realize what an evil trap they're getting themselves into when they buy into the Microsoft ideal.
Ahh, so good software can't be free, but work by people to keep track of liscenses somehow is. Hmmm...
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 2
I disagree here. There's a piece of code where I work that has many repetitive code blocks and very poorly designed algorithms. One of the better programmers is currently completely cleaning it up. Each change he makes increases the readability of the code while reducing its size and memory requirements.
The kind of programmers who write horribly obfuscated, but supposedly very tight code are usually ignoring better algorithms, the compiler's optimizer, or both. I, personally, would not let one of them be a part of an organization where I had some control who was working there.
TCP allows a connection to be established if both sides simultaneously send eachother a SYN packet. This method requires a little NAT cooperation, but only a little. Here's how it could work:
Side1 Binds their TCP socket to a particular port.
Side1 Tries to connect to Broker on an agreed upon port.
Broker Replies with an RST when it recieves the expected SYN. Records source IP and source port.
Side2 Binds their TCP socket to a particular port.
Side2 Tries to connect to Broker on an agreed upon port.
Broker Replies with an RST when it recieves the expected SYN. Records source IP and source port.
Broker Informs Side1 of Side2's source port and source IP.
Broker Informs Side2 of Side1's source port and source IP.
Source1 Uses same socket originally bound to connect to Source2's IP and port.
Source2 Uses same socket originally bound to connect to Source1's IP and port.
Walah! They connect via exchange of simultaneous SYNs.
This requires cooperation between the sources and their NATs. Specifically, it requires these three things from a NAT:
The NAT should keep the same outgoing port for the same TCP port on a client for a period of time. This is very similar to how a NAT handles UDP.
A NAT must not reply to SYNs it recieves on a bound TCP port that don't originate from the connected to IP. Normally it would reply with an RST.
A NAT must change the IP it's expecting TCP packets from if the client sends out a new SYN to a different IP and port combo.
There is one non-problem I expect people to bring up. There seems to be an apparent race condition in step 11. This isn't really a race condition because of requirement 2 for NATs. Basically, the two sources can SYN eachother all day, and it won't matter until both NATs have performed the step required by requirement 3, at which point it will appear to both sources as if the SYNs were simultaneous.
While this is quite true, the companies that choose to pursue their goal of making money through sleazy licensing tactics and anti-competitive business tactics are wrong to do what they do.
I would quit a company that pulled those kinds of stunts. I very nearly did once when a company I worked for contracted out to have their stock promoted via spam.
There are many ways of making money, but if a company chooses to make money by some means other than providing a superior product, excellent service, or some other strong benefit to their customers, their a bad and evil company. Them being a company does not automatically free them from being held to a moral standard for what they choose to do.
The reason I gave up on Intel about 3-5 years ago is that it was becoming apparent that they were relying on marketing and sleazy business tactics over engineering excellence. Until they change, I will continue to do so.
Your analysis appears to be 2 years behind the times. Oops.
Re:Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made
on
Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 2
Looking at the design, it looks like you could integrate this into a natural coastline with a minimum of disruption.
As for the way middle class Americans live, if energy costs went up, they'd live differently. That's the beauty of economics. Lobby for higher taxes on fossil fuels, or carbon credit schemes for power plants. That'll do much better than lecturing everybody on what a wasteful slob they are.
If you must lecture, do it in the form of example.
Re:True P2P applications have this limitation
on
Gnutella's Challenge
·
· Score: 2
The solution is ersatz election of servers by some means. This would cause the servers to change randomly. There still would really be no server.
If we could trust what people said about the bandwidth of their links, the election wouldn't actually be too hard.
The printing press, broadcast media, and now the Internet have all had a major effect on the politics of their day. New forms of communication, at their very heart, are strongly tied to politics. Why do you think the first ammendment exists?
Near as I can tell, there are a group of people on here who will come up with any excuse for Intel.
"It's incompatible!". Which was a blatant lie.
Sure it may be cheaper, but Intel is slightly faster, and _always_ will be!
Sure, it's faster, but Intel has SMP!
AMD may have SMP, but nobody knows how stable it will be.
Intel's new chip may not have SMP, but people should still stick with old and slow because nobody knows how stable AMDs SMP will be. Only 31337 H4X0R5 will use AMD!
I bet soon it will be: You should stick with Intel because they will be faster than AMD in their next generation. Or something equally stupid. Any excuse for Intel.
One is tempted to wonder where these people's heads are. Or perhaps not, since most people don't like to think about smelly, dark places that are full of solid waste.
This is just a certification mark institutionalized in the domain naming system. As such, it doesn't bother me so much. The validity of the certification mark is entirely dependent on the percieved trustworthiness of WHO. If they mess up and start not including good information because it doesn't come from sources they approve of, the certification mark will lose its validity.
As for the comments people are making about whether or not the Internet is authoritative... It is no more or less authoritative than any other source. Every piece of information you get needs to be picked through critically. The idea that some source or another is somehow 'official' exists because of mass broadcast media. It's a historical anomoly that I think is in the process of being rectified.
It's an interesting western philosophical bias that minds are somehow seperate from bodies. In my opinion, simply replicating what the brain does won't be enough.
The brain recieves input and stimuli from all of the body's systems. The brain is also messy and imprecise internally. I think all of those factors will actually turn out to be important.
It may also turn out to be the case that the brain depends on quantum phenomena to function. Yet another thing to worry about.
We seem to be doing fine with IPv4 combined with NAT. Ugly, but it works. IPv6 seems to be suffering from a combination of second-system effect, and too many cooks.
The geographical features in particular show that the people who built it haven't taken the Internet and what it represents to heart.
Inside IPv6 is a small, easy-to-implement protocol waiting to get out. Hopefully someone will notice.
The partisanship of the responses here really surprises me.
I admit having a slight bias towards Gore, though I would never have voted for him. (I voted for Harry Browne). But, this whole thing is ridiculous. If you're not careful you'll rip the country apart over a really stupid issue. And while I think this country is going to ultimately degenerate into a tyranny that will require a bloody revolution to overthrow, it hasn't quite yet, and I maintain hope.:-)
The ballots _are_ confusing. Look at them. I bet the election commisioner signed off on them because they looked vaguely acceptable without realizing what an important factor it might become. Negligence and incompetence to be sure, but understandable.
OTOH, taking all the Buchanon votes and calling them Gore votes is utterly ridiculous. The spike could easily be explained via regional variation of opinion or some other anomoly.
I actually think that the Gore people should've taken note of the problem, and raised it after the presidency had been decided. I think it was horribly irresponsible for them to cause this kind of controversy at this stage of the game. It's a very dangerous thing to do.
I wish I knew what the answer was. I wish people would stop trying to take sides here and honestly look at the problem and attempt to determine a solution. Bickering based on your choice of candidate is incredibly irresponsible. Think about what the stakes are here.
Yes, the article is done up in vapid, breathless 'IT Rag' speak designed to make a manager think their job is exciting and that they learned something important by reading the article.
The article could be summed up in a paragraph or three as:
The stable version of the Linux 2.4 kernel, which was expected to be released 4th quarter of last year, will instead likely be released this December of this year. While the 2.2 kernel is quite functional and adequate for many people's needs, the 2.4 kernel has some nice, long awaited features such as support for USB and better tuned SMP performance, along with a re-written networking stack.
Many of the SMP and networking improvements were made because NT 4 beat the Linux 2.2 kernel in some benchmarks in the beginning of 1999, and it's hoped that the improvements will avoid a repeat of that embarassment.
Several Linux distributions are prepared to release a new version as soon as the 2.4 kernel becomes available, having already prepared for its release in the current versions of their products.
How insipidly vacuous can you get? And this was rated as insightful. How sad.
The system is so messed up, it will never be fixed until we all live in a totalitarian state. Of course, by then the guns will be all locked up, but that's OK because we will have all voted for it every step of the way.
We are so incredibly stupid. Watch the media circus and vote for the choices presented. Ignore the men behind the curtain. It's so stupidly pointless I don't see why anybody bothers.
Ahh, that makes sense. It would be very hard for the GPL to allow derivatives to be reliscensed under any liscense it considered sufficiently free, and still retain the conciseness and brevity that is its strength.
This is untrue. If there were no organization that could mass a large force to take your property from you, such as a government, you could enforce ownership of physical property yourself. Not only that, but if someone takes your physical property, you experience a direct loss.
If someone distributes the work that you have under copyright or patent while denying you the ability to enforce them, they have taken nothing from but but the right to invoke the power of government in forcing people to abide by your copyright or patent. Absent that force, absent government, there would be no copyrights or patents as they would be wholly unenforceable.
The only thing you might have are trade secret style NDAs that would give you cause to punish or war with the person who broke them, but not any of the people who they gave the information to.
Physical property most definitely has a different basis and status than copyrights or patents.
That's the most well reasoned and intelligent thing I've ever seen come out of this administration. Someone must've replaced Clinton with a benign space alien. He even unequivocally addresses the fact that Congress is largely hostile to him at the bottom of the essay.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the series, but thought the acting was bad. I actually liked the movie better. As a friend of mine pointed out, the movie is a poetic accompaniment to the book, not really something that can stand by itself. As a poetic accompaniment, it was excellent.
The series is a mediocre adaptation of the book to the screen. It doesn't appear to be a horrible adaptation, yet.
Why yes, yes it does. Thank you for noticing.
I'm not going to stop glibly saying that because I think it's in everybody's best interests to destroy the monopoly that produces the garbage that is Windows. This goal of monopoly destruction is well worth a temporarily slightly less than optimal solution to a particular problem. And whether or not it's slightly less than optimal is rather debatable IMHO. I think you're just afraid of a world without customer lock-in and propietary liscenses because you can't figure out how to make money by doing things other than stealing from the public domain and selling it to your customers.
This liscensing thing is a ridiculous abuse of the system on Microsoft's part. People should abandon this liscensing scheme. I'm happy this is being so well publicized so people truly realize what an evil trap they're getting themselves into when they buy into the Microsoft ideal.
Ahh, so good software can't be free, but work by people to keep track of liscenses somehow is. Hmmm...
I disagree here. There's a piece of code where I work that has many repetitive code blocks and very poorly designed algorithms. One of the better programmers is currently completely cleaning it up. Each change he makes increases the readability of the code while reducing its size and memory requirements.
The kind of programmers who write horribly obfuscated, but supposedly very tight code are usually ignoring better algorithms, the compiler's optimizer, or both. I, personally, would not let one of them be a part of an organization where I had some control who was working there.
TCP allows a connection to be established if both sides simultaneously send eachother a SYN packet. This method requires a little NAT cooperation, but only a little. Here's how it could work:
This requires cooperation between the sources and their NATs. Specifically, it requires these three things from a NAT:
There is one non-problem I expect people to bring up. There seems to be an apparent race condition in step 11. This isn't really a race condition because of requirement 2 for NATs. Basically, the two sources can SYN eachother all day, and it won't matter until both NATs have performed the step required by requirement 3, at which point it will appear to both sources as if the SYNs were simultaneous.
It's a hack, but I think it'd work.
While this is quite true, the companies that choose to pursue their goal of making money through sleazy licensing tactics and anti-competitive business tactics are wrong to do what they do.
I would quit a company that pulled those kinds of stunts. I very nearly did once when a company I worked for contracted out to have their stock promoted via spam.
There are many ways of making money, but if a company chooses to make money by some means other than providing a superior product, excellent service, or some other strong benefit to their customers, their a bad and evil company. Them being a company does not automatically free them from being held to a moral standard for what they choose to do.
The reason I gave up on Intel about 3-5 years ago is that it was becoming apparent that they were relying on marketing and sleazy business tactics over engineering excellence. Until they change, I will continue to do so.
Your analysis appears to be 2 years behind the times. Oops.
Looking at the design, it looks like you could integrate this into a natural coastline with a minimum of disruption.
As for the way middle class Americans live, if energy costs went up, they'd live differently. That's the beauty of economics. Lobby for higher taxes on fossil fuels, or carbon credit schemes for power plants. That'll do much better than lecturing everybody on what a wasteful slob they are.
If you must lecture, do it in the form of example.
The solution is ersatz election of servers by some means. This would cause the servers to change randomly. There still would really be no server.
If we could trust what people said about the bandwidth of their links, the election wouldn't actually be too hard.
The printing press, broadcast media, and now the Internet have all had a major effect on the politics of their day. New forms of communication, at their very heart, are strongly tied to politics. Why do you think the first ammendment exists?
With a technology like this, any nitpick is worth paying attention to.
Are there any Palm Pilot versions of GPG out there? :-)
Near as I can tell, there are a group of people on here who will come up with any excuse for Intel.
I bet soon it will be: You should stick with Intel because they will be faster than AMD in their next generation. Or something equally stupid. Any excuse for Intel.
One is tempted to wonder where these people's heads are. Or perhaps not, since most people don't like to think about smelly, dark places that are full of solid waste.
This is just a certification mark institutionalized in the domain naming system. As such, it doesn't bother me so much. The validity of the certification mark is entirely dependent on the percieved trustworthiness of WHO. If they mess up and start not including good information because it doesn't come from sources they approve of, the certification mark will lose its validity.
As for the comments people are making about whether or not the Internet is authoritative... It is no more or less authoritative than any other source. Every piece of information you get needs to be picked through critically. The idea that some source or another is somehow 'official' exists because of mass broadcast media. It's a historical anomoly that I think is in the process of being rectified.
It's an interesting western philosophical bias that minds are somehow seperate from bodies. In my opinion, simply replicating what the brain does won't be enough.
The brain recieves input and stimuli from all of the body's systems. The brain is also messy and imprecise internally. I think all of those factors will actually turn out to be important.
It may also turn out to be the case that the brain depends on quantum phenomena to function. Yet another thing to worry about.
We seem to be doing fine with IPv4 combined with NAT. Ugly, but it works. IPv6 seems to be suffering from a combination of second-system effect, and too many cooks.
The geographical features in particular show that the people who built it haven't taken the Internet and what it represents to heart.
Inside IPv6 is a small, easy-to-implement protocol waiting to get out. Hopefully someone will notice.
Yet another reason not to adopt IPv6.
The partisanship of the responses here really surprises me.
I admit having a slight bias towards Gore, though I would never have voted for him. (I voted for Harry Browne). But, this whole thing is ridiculous. If you're not careful you'll rip the country apart over a really stupid issue. And while I think this country is going to ultimately degenerate into a tyranny that will require a bloody revolution to overthrow, it hasn't quite yet, and I maintain hope. :-)
The ballots _are_ confusing. Look at them. I bet the election commisioner signed off on them because they looked vaguely acceptable without realizing what an important factor it might become. Negligence and incompetence to be sure, but understandable.
OTOH, taking all the Buchanon votes and calling them Gore votes is utterly ridiculous. The spike could easily be explained via regional variation of opinion or some other anomoly.
I actually think that the Gore people should've taken note of the problem, and raised it after the presidency had been decided. I think it was horribly irresponsible for them to cause this kind of controversy at this stage of the game. It's a very dangerous thing to do.
I wish I knew what the answer was. I wish people would stop trying to take sides here and honestly look at the problem and attempt to determine a solution. Bickering based on your choice of candidate is incredibly irresponsible. Think about what the stakes are here.
Yes, the article is done up in vapid, breathless 'IT Rag' speak designed to make a manager think their job is exciting and that they learned something important by reading the article.
The article could be summed up in a paragraph or three as:
The stable version of the Linux 2.4 kernel, which was expected to be released 4th quarter of last year, will instead likely be released this December of this year. While the 2.2 kernel is quite functional and adequate for many people's needs, the 2.4 kernel has some nice, long awaited features such as support for USB and better tuned SMP performance, along with a re-written networking stack.
Many of the SMP and networking improvements were made because NT 4 beat the Linux 2.2 kernel in some benchmarks in the beginning of 1999, and it's hoped that the improvements will avoid a repeat of that embarassment.
Several Linux distributions are prepared to release a new version as soon as the 2.4 kernel becomes available, having already prepared for its release in the current versions of their products.
How insipidly vacuous can you get? And this was rated as insightful. How sad.
The system is so messed up, it will never be fixed until we all live in a totalitarian state. Of course, by then the guns will be all locked up, but that's OK because we will have all voted for it every step of the way.
We are so incredibly stupid. Watch the media circus and vote for the choices presented. Ignore the men behind the curtain. It's so stupidly pointless I don't see why anybody bothers.
How would the masses ever have found out about client-server architecture if it hadn't been for Netscape?
Yes, you are correct. I was leaving implied that one of the requirements would be that any other liscense be of a similarily 'viral' nature.
Ahh, that makes sense. It would be very hard for the GPL to allow derivatives to be reliscensed under any liscense it considered sufficiently free, and still retain the conciseness and brevity that is its strength.
This is untrue. If there were no organization that could mass a large force to take your property from you, such as a government, you could enforce ownership of physical property yourself. Not only that, but if someone takes your physical property, you experience a direct loss.
If someone distributes the work that you have under copyright or patent while denying you the ability to enforce them, they have taken nothing from but but the right to invoke the power of government in forcing people to abide by your copyright or patent. Absent that force, absent government, there would be no copyrights or patents as they would be wholly unenforceable.
The only thing you might have are trade secret style NDAs that would give you cause to punish or war with the person who broke them, but not any of the people who they gave the information to.
Physical property most definitely has a different basis and status than copyrights or patents.
That's the most well reasoned and intelligent thing I've ever seen come out of this administration. Someone must've replaced Clinton with a benign space alien. He even unequivocally addresses the fact that Congress is largely hostile to him at the bottom of the essay.