How does this tablet miss the mark? Are you afraid that the touchscreen resolution isn't high enough for your needs? Just because it's designed to respond to your finger doesn't mean you can't use a stylus.
I used to work for a mining company. A lot of mines are in remote locations, like Arizona or Wyoming. We'd regularly install a PBX in our office that handled more lines than the local telco's switch, and then we'd connect to said telco over barbed wire fences. Literally. Digging trenches disturbed the land, so we'd use posts that were designed for electric fencing to isolate the individual strands, and run barbed wire because it was the only thing that grazing ungulates wouldn't eventually lean against.
Back in college, the EEs and physics majors had T-shirts that were similar to this, only with Maxwell's equations. IIRC, they had the differential form from the linked table.
I'm not going to dispute the half of adding more spindles for better performance, but additional storage space is not always an added benefit. Do you have any idea how frustrating it can be to explain to users that "yes, we have 4TB of unused space" and "no, you can't put another database there without killing your existing one"?
That's called short stroking. No, really, you only use the innermost tracks of your drives to avoid long seeks, turning a 144 GB drive into 72 or even 36 GB. If you do it right, the unused capacity doesn't show up on any of your reports, so no one ever realizes that the extra space is there.
If you're primarily going to be doing reads, particular random reads, or even if you're going to be doing mostly random writes rather than serial writes, an SSD is probably a good idea.
Which, as you undoubtedly know, is why enterprise data centers use SANs (Storage Attached Networks) with multiple tiers of storage. You use big slow drives for archival storage (old emails, for instance), and smaller faster drives for day-to-day use (databases, etc). Flash drives get used when performance really matters, such as database indexes, not the actual data.
I mean, if you're a 6er, you could still at least be one in a million! What's in it for 7ers? A lifetime spent in derision as perpetual n00bs.
I'm guessing that once 8-digit uids come along, the achivements will get a promotion and 6ers will finally get a point. Let's see, the largest uid in this thread is 1522063, and (1522063-1e6)/(1e7-1e6) = 0.058007. Thus, we're over 5.8% of the way there! And since it's only taken 11 years to get this far, we can expect to see 8ers start showing up in, hmm, 2187 or so.:-(
Don't forget that as the atmospheric pressure on the moon increases, the rate of flow would slow down. The moon's surface area is 7.4% of Earth's, so once roughly that amount of air gets sucked through, the pressures would equalize. Assuming a straight line instead of exponential decay, that should take at least 1332 years. Based on the information given in http://books.google.com/books?id=2jwrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13, it would take at least a millennium for 1-1/e (that's 63%) of the lunar atmosphere to leak away. Coincidentally, atmospheric pressure atop Mount Everest is one-third of sea level, which is the limit of human endurance. At that rate, it would take at least 13,513 years for enough of the Earth's atmosphere to escape to kill everyone.
That does suggest an idea. Open a portal, wait 450 years for the moon get to Mount Everest pressure, and then send people through equipped with just climber's oxygen tanks to build the infra structure for a permanent lunar colony.
I've found that, as an engineer myself (originally) the greatest lack of understanding among computer science majors are the details of the hardware itself.
Ditto. I started out working on a BS in EE, but my school didn't have a good digital program at that time, so my advisor suggested I switch to CompSci. Later in grad school, I took as many EE courses as my electives allowed. I now work in professional services for a major manufacturer of computer equipment, and while I don't use my EE background every day, I don't think I would be where I am today without it.
An MBA is the most versatile, especially if you want to go into an industry other than computers (consulting, managing, etc). An MBA from a good school opens more doors than anything else.
With the financial sector meltdown, MBAs seem to be worth less than even a year ago. Universities are responding by offering more courses in ethics, but it's an open question how quickly the field will recover. My degree is in Comp. Sci., but I've been in IT my whole career and it doesn't seem to have made much difference; I make as much as my peers with the same amount of post-grad work. Arguably, I could have moved to "Californie" and made a killing at some startup, but that always seemed a bit of a lottery: some win big, but lots disappear without a trace. And there's a good chance I'd have lost it all in the last year anyway. As you get older, the real value of any advanced degree is to show that you know how to learn on your own.
Blocking torrents is well within their rights and if it is listed as being against their terms of service, then by using the VPN service to violate the terms of service, one should have one's ISP account canceled.
Name some legal, logical uses for a VPN connection to Pirate Bay, with current, valid examples.
Check out http://www.blacklogic.com/, http://www.hotspotvpn.com/ and
http://world-secure-channel.com/. These are three sites that offer VPN services to the public, and they list lots of current, valid reasons why someone might want such services. TPB looks like they will be undercutting all of these sites on price, which makes TPB very appealing for these legal, logical uses.
Please note that people can and often do install multiple HTTP daemons, databases and even window managers on a given server. For example, you may want to use Apache for customizable content and thttpd for static content. Different subsystems may prefer MySQL or Postgres. And back in the day, I used Sun workstations that gave me a choice of Motif or OPEN LOOK. To me, at least, this defines them as application programs. And also note that all of those sub-systems run in user-space, not as root, which further deliniates them as not being integral parts of the OS.
On the other hand, it's seldom obvious whether an init script is built atop GNU, Busybox, BSD, or something else. While I doubt that anyone would refer to it as such in casual conversation, I'm all in favor of the documentation calling out such components, at least the first time it's mentioned in each chapter/web-page.
Heck, while we're at it, I'd also like Debian/Red Hat/Gentoo/etc slipped into a distribution's official designation, so I'd know how to install packages.
Yes, I and many others use non-GNU tools such as BusyBox where appropriate. I don't want to have to differentiate between BusyBox/Linux and GNU/Linux.
I rather wish that people would do that. All of these tools have subtle differences from each other. I'd like to know up front which set of tools were used in a distribution rather than having to waste time tracking down someone's feature that's manifesting itself as a bug.
Any version of Emacs you might use, including any of the commercial Emacs clones that are proprietary and closed-source, are based on the open-source Emacs written by none other than RMS.
How could emacs be distributed as proprietary and closed-source?
Branching a proprietary version of Emacs is easy to do even today. The GPL certainly allows that; XEmacs (originally Lucid Emacs) did this many years ago. To create a closed-source version takes a bit of digging, but remember that Emacs (written in 1976) predates the GPL (written in 1989). I'd imagine that as long as you branch one of those older versions, you'd be safe. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Emacs for information on other forks over the years.
I think his problem is with the obfuscation of said javascript and HTML code. His example points to the google code which is supplied with no comments and method naming which has been intentionally obfuscated. A normal web developer has no need to obfuscate the code.
Are you sure that the intent is to obfuscate? There's no other possibility? Maybe shrinking the size of the file transferred to increase performance?
I can't wait for the technical support calls. Can you imagine trying to support people who run into errors using your site because they chose not to use your version of a javascript routine but instead replaced it with their own? Not to mention that this is not a fact they are going to disclose over the phone, and, at some point, won't even realize it is happening.
It's just a versioning problem. Once upon a time, version control software used X.YY style numbers, but they've moved to using cryptographic checksums. Similarly, I presume that your software currently displays a version number somewhere that's requested during support calls. Instead, it should start displaying a checksum calculated at run-time. Sure, that routine could be changed to return a hard-coded number, but you just need to make sure that doing so will turn out to be very expensive for the user.
I don't really want users to be able to run their own preferred javascripts on my pages - especially not the intranet type of pages I mostly work on.
Users are already able to do this, it just isn't very easy or convenient.
People here probably assume that an individual who'd be in the position to modify a script would know enough to identify the true source of any problems that come up.
One solution is to have your program checksum itself in some way, and include that checksum in any error messages. Not a full cryptographic checksum, a 16-bit CRC would be enough. I'd presume that your programs identify their version well enough, this would be a minor addition. (And yes, I realize that a user could hard-code the checksum value. It's hard to fix that level of stupidity via technical means.)
Based on my experience, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - a lot of users (especially faculty - I work at an academic institution in an engineering department) think they understand far more than they actually do.
That's almost an admission of inadequate code documentation.
However, he is and always has been a zealot. I'm not sure he'll be happy until capitalism is dead and bleeding, and an enlightened neo-socialist landscape covers the world, along with with peace, harmony, and fluffy bunnies.
Have you ever actually read the GPL? It is expressly designed to allow a developer to sell their software for a profit. I've explained this further in another post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1128363&cid=26862899), but using the GPL doesn't mean that you have to make your source code available for anyone, it just means that your paying customers must be allowed to view and modify it; and just because your client has their own copy of the source code, no one else is allowed to repost it elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
How does this tablet miss the mark? Are you afraid that the touchscreen resolution isn't high enough for your needs? Just because it's designed to respond to your finger doesn't mean you can't use a stylus.
Hmmm, you must have missed this comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1194265&cid=27528153
I used to work for a mining company. A lot of mines are in remote locations, like Arizona or Wyoming. We'd regularly install a PBX in our office that handled more lines than the local telco's switch, and then we'd connect to said telco over barbed wire fences. Literally. Digging trenches disturbed the land, so we'd use posts that were designed for electric fencing to isolate the individual strands, and run barbed wire because it was the only thing that grazing ungulates wouldn't eventually lean against.
Schrodinger called, he wants his cat back.
Back in college, the EEs and physics majors had T-shirts that were similar to this, only with Maxwell's equations. IIRC, they had the differential form from the linked table.
I'm not going to dispute the half of adding more spindles for better performance, but additional storage space is not always an added benefit. Do you have any idea how frustrating it can be to explain to users that "yes, we have 4TB of unused space" and "no, you can't put another database there without killing your existing one"?
That's called short stroking. No, really, you only use the innermost tracks of your drives to avoid long seeks, turning a 144 GB drive into 72 or even 36 GB. If you do it right, the unused capacity doesn't show up on any of your reports, so no one ever realizes that the extra space is there.
If you're primarily going to be doing reads, particular random reads, or even if you're going to be doing mostly random writes rather than serial writes, an SSD is probably a good idea.
Which, as you undoubtedly know, is why enterprise data centers use SANs (Storage Attached Networks) with multiple tiers of storage. You use big slow drives for archival storage (old emails, for instance), and smaller faster drives for day-to-day use (databases, etc). Flash drives get used when performance really matters, such as database indexes, not the actual data.
I mean, if you're a 6er, you could still at least be one in a million! What's in it for 7ers? A lifetime spent in derision as perpetual n00bs.
I'm guessing that once 8-digit uids come along, the achivements will get a promotion and 6ers will finally get a point. Let's see, the largest uid in this thread is 1522063, and (1522063-1e6)/(1e7-1e6) = 0.058007. Thus, we're over 5.8% of the way there! And since it's only taken 11 years to get this far, we can expect to see 8ers start showing up in, hmm, 2187 or so. :-(
Don't forget that as the atmospheric pressure on the moon increases, the rate of flow would slow down. The moon's surface area is 7.4% of Earth's, so once roughly that amount of air gets sucked through, the pressures would equalize. Assuming a straight line instead of exponential decay, that should take at least 1332 years. Based on the information given in http://books.google.com/books?id=2jwrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13, it would take at least a millennium for 1-1/e (that's 63%) of the lunar atmosphere to leak away. Coincidentally, atmospheric pressure atop Mount Everest is one-third of sea level, which is the limit of human endurance. At that rate, it would take at least 13,513 years for enough of the Earth's atmosphere to escape to kill everyone.
That does suggest an idea. Open a portal, wait 450 years for the moon get to Mount Everest pressure, and then send people through equipped with just climber's oxygen tanks to build the infra structure for a permanent lunar colony.
Once we hit 6 figures, we stop rewarding ;)
Well, that sucks. :-(
I'm quite aware that Coke can mean any sort of soda in some parts of the US, but I've never heard cola used that way.
That would be in the Norwegian part, obviously.
User cron has earned: Days Read in a Row
I've got that one, as well. 2^5 is 32, does that mean that I've yet to read /. for 64 consecutive days? I think I can do that!
I've found that, as an engineer myself (originally) the greatest lack of understanding among computer science majors are the details of the hardware itself.
Ditto. I started out working on a BS in EE, but my school didn't have a good digital program at that time, so my advisor suggested I switch to CompSci. Later in grad school, I took as many EE courses as my electives allowed. I now work in professional services for a major manufacturer of computer equipment, and while I don't use my EE background every day, I don't think I would be where I am today without it.
An MBA is the most versatile, especially if you want to go into an industry other than computers (consulting, managing, etc). An MBA from a good school opens more doors than anything else.
That's not as true as in the past. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/is-it-time-to-retrain-b-schools/
With the financial sector meltdown, MBAs seem to be worth less than even a year ago. Universities are responding by offering more courses in ethics, but it's an open question how quickly the field will recover. My degree is in Comp. Sci., but I've been in IT my whole career and it doesn't seem to have made much difference; I make as much as my peers with the same amount of post-grad work. Arguably, I could have moved to "Californie" and made a killing at some startup, but that always seemed a bit of a lottery: some win big, but lots disappear without a trace. And there's a good chance I'd have lost it all in the last year anyway. As you get older, the real value of any advanced degree is to show that you know how to learn on your own.
Blocking torrents is well within their rights and if it is listed as being against their terms of service, then by using the VPN service to violate the terms of service, one should have one's ISP account canceled.
I am unaware of any ISP whose terms of service forbids the use of torrents. If you know of one, please enlighten us. I regularly uses torrents hosted by VMware to download software appliances, but on at least one occasion TPB has saved my butt when I needed to repair a large corrupted file. http://www.hackernotcracker.com/2007-02/cleverly-repair-large-corrupted-files-with-bittorrent-client-checksum-hash-scans.html
Name some legal, logical uses for a VPN connection to Pirate Bay, with current, valid examples.
Check out http://www.blacklogic.com/, http://www.hotspotvpn.com/ and http://world-secure-channel.com/. These are three sites that offer VPN services to the public, and they list lots of current, valid reasons why someone might want such services. TPB looks like they will be undercutting all of these sites on price, which makes TPB very appealing for these legal, logical uses.
Please note that people can and often do install multiple HTTP daemons, databases and even window managers on a given server. For example, you may want to use Apache for customizable content and thttpd for static content. Different subsystems may prefer MySQL or Postgres. And back in the day, I used Sun workstations that gave me a choice of Motif or OPEN LOOK. To me, at least, this defines them as application programs. And also note that all of those sub-systems run in user-space, not as root, which further deliniates them as not being integral parts of the OS.
On the other hand, it's seldom obvious whether an init script is built atop GNU, Busybox, BSD, or something else. While I doubt that anyone would refer to it as such in casual conversation, I'm all in favor of the documentation calling out such components, at least the first time it's mentioned in each chapter/web-page.
Heck, while we're at it, I'd also like Debian/Red Hat/Gentoo/etc slipped into a distribution's official designation, so I'd know how to install packages.
Yes, I and many others use non-GNU tools such as BusyBox where appropriate. I don't want to have to differentiate between BusyBox/Linux and GNU/Linux.
I rather wish that people would do that. All of these tools have subtle differences from each other. I'd like to know up front which set of tools were used in a distribution rather than having to waste time tracking down someone's feature that's manifesting itself as a bug.
Any version of Emacs you might use, including any of the commercial Emacs clones that are proprietary and closed-source, are based on the open-source Emacs written by none other than RMS.
How could emacs be distributed as proprietary and closed-source?
Branching a proprietary version of Emacs is easy to do even today. The GPL certainly allows that; XEmacs (originally Lucid Emacs) did this many years ago. To create a closed-source version takes a bit of digging, but remember that Emacs (written in 1976) predates the GPL (written in 1989). I'd imagine that as long as you branch one of those older versions, you'd be safe. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Emacs for information on other forks over the years.
I think his problem is with the obfuscation of said javascript and HTML code. His example points to the google code which is supplied with no comments and method naming which has been intentionally obfuscated. A normal web developer has no need to obfuscate the code.
Are you sure that the intent is to obfuscate? There's no other possibility? Maybe shrinking the size of the file transferred to increase performance?
Check out HTTP's Content-Encoding header.
I can't wait for the technical support calls. Can you imagine trying to support people who run into errors using your site because they chose not to use your version of a javascript routine but instead replaced it with their own? Not to mention that this is not a fact they are going to disclose over the phone, and, at some point, won't even realize it is happening.
It's just a versioning problem. Once upon a time, version control software used X.YY style numbers, but they've moved to using cryptographic checksums. Similarly, I presume that your software currently displays a version number somewhere that's requested during support calls. Instead, it should start displaying a checksum calculated at run-time. Sure, that routine could be changed to return a hard-coded number, but you just need to make sure that doing so will turn out to be very expensive for the user.
I wonder, too ... does Mr. Stallman's PC have a proprietary BIOS, or did he write that code, too?
I'd bet that his PC uses Coreboot. It's been around for a decade now.
I don't really want users to be able to run their own preferred javascripts on my pages - especially not the intranet type of pages I mostly work on.
Users are already able to do this, it just isn't very easy or convenient.
People here probably assume that an individual who'd be in the position to modify a script would know enough to identify the true source of any problems that come up.
One solution is to have your program checksum itself in some way, and include that checksum in any error messages. Not a full cryptographic checksum, a 16-bit CRC would be enough. I'd presume that your programs identify their version well enough, this would be a minor addition. (And yes, I realize that a user could hard-code the checksum value. It's hard to fix that level of stupidity via technical means.)
Based on my experience, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - a lot of users (especially faculty - I work at an academic institution in an engineering department) think they understand far more than they actually do.
That's almost an admission of inadequate code documentation.
However, he is and always has been a zealot. I'm not sure he'll be happy until capitalism is dead and bleeding, and an enlightened neo-socialist landscape covers the world, along with with peace, harmony, and fluffy bunnies.
Have you ever actually read the GPL? It is expressly designed to allow a developer to sell their software for a profit. I've explained this further in another post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1128363&cid=26862899), but using the GPL doesn't mean that you have to make your source code available for anyone, it just means that your paying customers must be allowed to view and modify it; and just because your client has their own copy of the source code, no one else is allowed to repost it elsewhere.