Any formation when taken by itself is a small part of the worlds supply. Yeah, Saudia Arabia has less than 25% of the world's reserves. A very small part indeed.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Admittedly, I know next to nil about the internals of X, however I think that it does its job well for what it was intended. The problem is that home-use of "desktop" linux is NOT what X was intended for. [...] For "desktop linux," I don't see why the system isn't reworked to run off of a frame-buffer and scrap all the X crap -- still keep X for running networked apps. X uses multiple communications channels. There's TCP and DECnet, used for apps running on a different machine than the display server, and there's Unix pipes, which provide much higher throughput for local apps. But Unix pipes are nearly legacy now, because most servers also support MIT-SHM (the MIT Shared Memory extension), which lets an app have direct access to the X server's graphics buffers, and GLX (the OpenGL extension), used for running 3D graphics over a network. Finally, there's VirtualGL, which is a layer that can be used on top of either X11 or VNC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL for more info.)
X11 already provides desktop Linux with you need to run high performance graphics.
I was going to say that arms would make it top heavy and more likely to tip over. But then I realized that you'd just need to use some Segway-like programming to make it self-balancing. Just stuff some accelerometers into its "head", and it would probably be good against people bumping into it.
I think I'd like to home-brew one of these. Time to fire up my RepRap!
For starters, alphabetical order is the wrong arrangement for the pictures. You don't want pictures 10 thru 16 spliced between 1 and 2, which a shell-glob will give you.
BTW, I created them from the caltech screen-res images using this Python script: from PIL import Image full = Image.new('RGB', (16*900, 492)) for i in range(16):
piece = Image.open('ssc2008-11b%d_medium.jpg' % (i+1))
full.paste(piece, (i*900, 0)) full.save('ssc2008-11b_medium.jpg')
I live in St. Louis and I'd like to take my kids to the convention center to see this thing. Is it somewhere that it can be viewed by the public, or do they expect full admission prices for three kids under 10?
Re:Remove Idle Section from Front Page
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
I'm impressed. That's pretty simple, and it does exactly what I want. Opening every link that way is fine with me; I can always disable GM if I really need to. Or now that I see how easy it is, I may fix it to zap just the links in <div id="articles">.
I like to read/. and open every interesting link in a new tab. Then, while the pages are loading in the background, I go through and read them in chronological order.
Re:Remove Idle Section from Front Page
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
Hey! Any chance you could write a script to open/. links in a new window/tab? Thanks!
doesn't everybody have an unfinished novel waiting for attention? I used to have an unfinished novel, but it got tired of waiting and ran off with an unfinished surfer movie. Last I heard, they were shacking up somewhere in Southern California.
Is part of your input to the checker, an assertion that the property shall be decidable for the given program?
If we have that, then we have a decider for halting, or anything that reduces to halting, and the only decision we have to make is to repeat your overriding assertion. No, I don't make that assertion, because in practice I don't care that the decider itself may (apparently) never halt. The decider has three outputs: "Yes, it's good", "No, here's a list of the problems I've found", and "Can you give me another minute?"
Staic analysis is a lot like the traveling salesman problem. The fact that there's no general solution doesn't preclude the existence of useful tools. A static analysis just has to try to transform the program into a simpler one, and if it takes too long then we still have useful information.
It's a generalization of the Halting Problem. The basic idea is that there is no algorithm for any non-trivial property ("does this program halt on every input?" "does this array get written out-of-bounds?" "does this value overflow?") that can verify every program. All such properties are undecidable. Such properties may be undecidable for every possible program, but that doesn't mean that they are undecidable for a specific program. main(){printf("Hello, world!")} is decidable, for instance. Non-trivial program can also be decidable in a practical sense, if not an absolute sense. Consider this bit of Python: with open('somefile', 'r') as f:
for line in f:
print reversed(line) As long as the iterator returned by open halts, so does the program, which means that as long as 'somefile' isn't a symlink to/dev/zero or some similar nonsense, we're safe.
Well, applied to an actual project, there was a method which just closed the connection and the statements supplied as an array. Just because, you know, it's freaking stupid to copy-and-paste cute little "if (connection != null) { try { connection.close(); } catch (SQLException e) {// ignore }}" blocks a thousand times over in each "finally" block, when you can write it once and just call the method in your finally block. This tool had a trouble understanding that it _is_ all right. Unless it saw the "connection.close()" right there, in the finally block, it didn't count. I've tried and failed to understand what you're talking about here, specifically the bit about "the statements supplied as an array".
Also, if you have a thousand places you need to copy your "close the connection" block, that imples thousands of places where you're communicating with the database. Refactor all of those into a very few methods which include the "close connection" block, and you'll not only get fewer complaints from the static ananlysis tool, you're have better code as well.
I've got (and love) Dish Network's DVR (yeah, the one that just lost the patent infringement lawsuit from Tivo). It lets me skip ahead 60 secs and back 15 seconds, which works well for commercials. It also has a View button that skips all the way forward to the live feed (great if, during a commercial, I rewind to watch a cheer^H^H^H^H^H^Hscrimage in quarter speed slow-mo). Five minutes before it starts recording, it pops up a message box telling me that I can stay on the current show or go ahead and record the show that I'd scheduled. The models with only one tuner can only let you watch whatevers being recorded (or a priously made recording), but there are two tuner models that let you watch a live feed while recording another. A new feature was added this spring (via software download); now you can say that you want all episodes of, say, Mythbusters or just the ones flagged "new". In either case, it will skip any eps that are still on the hard drive. (So, if it records the 9pm episode, it will skip the repeat at 1am. Or, if a higher priority recording preempts Mythbusters at 9pm, it will pick it up at 1am instead. Yes, all of your recording rules get priorities to automatically resolve conflicts.)
I believe that if God REALLY didn't want us doing this stuff, he probably would have either stopped us, made it impossible for us, or given some indication of his intentions, rather than leaving it up to us to figure his opinion out ourselves. God called. He said he'd give us an indication on April 13, 2036. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html
The problem is, OpenSSL needed a buffer in which to XOR several sources of randomness, including/dev/random. OpenSSL didn't bother initializing the buffer, because doing so just eats CPU cycles, and a possibly random buffer is marginally better than a non-random one. However, the Debian patch removed *all* of the randomness except for the PID, leaving the user with one of just 262148 (or so) distinct keypairs. The tool that checks if your keys have been conpromised has a list of all of those keypairs and checks if your keypair appears.
The problem is, OpenSSL needed a buffer in which to XOR several sources of randomness. OpenSSL didn't bother initializing the buffer, because doing so just eats CPU cycles, and a possibly random buffer is marginally better than a non-random one. However, the patch removed *all* of the randomness except for the PID, leaving the user with one of just 262148 (or so) distinct keypairs.
Why does the "ohnoitsroland" and similar tags ALWAYS disappear? I just noticed that http://science.slashdot.org/tags/ohnoitsroland lists a number of recent stories, but when you look at the stories themselves, the tag is missing. This indicates that the tag is still present in the database, but is being filtered at display time.
Of course, I'm not sure of any way to make use of theat information. I'm thinking that I need to write a Firefox extension that reformats the/. homepage to hide any post starting with "Roland Piquepaille writes".
Problem: the VCS doesn't know the base of the project. If I'm editing a file in/home/me/src/projects/utilities/ljbackup/database, exactly what portion of that path is this project's tree and which is the part the project lives under? IIRC, some VCSs know. When you do a checkout, they store the path where you issued that command in a cache, which can be found relative to $HOME, not $CWD. Hmmm, it's been over a year since I last used it, but the more I think about it, the more I think that rPath's Conary works this way.
Why do you need a working directory without meta-data present? I can't think of too many reasons, and the ones I can think of fall under "That's probably a bad idea.". Did you even bother to read the entirety of my reply? I said, "The MacOS programs Keynote and Pages pro-actively remove.svn (and other) directories when they find them." In other words, you have some Keynote objects; they look like files inside Finder, but they're really directories. You put them into your favorite VCS and then check them out. The VCS adds its.vcs subdirs all over the place. You open the object with Keynote to make some changes, and Keynote says "Wots dis, gov'ner? It shouldn't be 'ere!" and proceeds to nuke the subdirs.
Yes, Apple should fix their software. Good luck getting that done. Yes, you shouldn't use broken software. But no one knew it was broken until they decided to start using a VCS. Yes, people have developed ways to work-around the problem. But it would be nice to have a system that worked out-of-the-box. Keeping your meta-data in a parallel tree is one way to do that.
I'm not sure that this isn't a trumped up use-case, but I wonder if it would be possible to have a parallel directory with all of the metadata in it, instead of using.svn directories. I understand that it's programatically convenient to be able to look at./.svn/myfile wherever we are in the source tree, but things like the MacOS programs Keynote and Pages pro-actively remove.svn (and other) directories when they find them. Having a ~/.svn-meta directory that parallels the checked-out directory would be a good thing. VCS systems already know the 'base' of a project, so meta-data for $BASE/$PATH/myfile could be stored at ~/.svn-meta/$PATH/myfile, leaving a very clean checkout tree.
What you don't seem to realize is that these claims aren't based only on accidents involving humans. Lots of animal tests have also been done. You can look at what happens to an animal in very low pressure and in hard vacuum, and at what happens to humans in very low pressure, and make some good guesses about what will happen to a human in a hard vacuum. And the truth is that, yea, the difference in absolute pressure is about a million times, but that still translates to just a few microbars. What's important is the difference between the presure inside your skin and the pressure outside, and a difference of microbars just doesn't make much difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are lots of pretty charts showing the price of oil in dollars compared to price in euros:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/80874-how-oil-and-gas-prices-fare-in-dollar-vs-euro-terms
[...]
For "desktop linux," I don't see why the system isn't reworked to run off of a frame-buffer and scrap all the X crap -- still keep X for running networked apps. X uses multiple communications channels. There's TCP and DECnet, used for apps running on a different machine than the display server, and there's Unix pipes, which provide much higher throughput for local apps. But Unix pipes are nearly legacy now, because most servers also support MIT-SHM (the MIT Shared Memory extension), which lets an app have direct access to the X server's graphics buffers, and GLX (the OpenGL extension), used for running 3D graphics over a network. Finally, there's VirtualGL, which is a layer that can be used on top of either X11 or VNC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL for more info.)
X11 already provides desktop Linux with you need to run high performance graphics.
I was going to say that arms would make it top heavy and more likely to tip over. But then I realized that you'd just need to use some Segway-like programming to make it self-balancing. Just stuff some accelerometers into its "head", and it would probably be good against people bumping into it.
I think I'd like to home-brew one of these. Time to fire up my RepRap!
For starters, alphabetical order is the wrong arrangement for the pictures. You don't want pictures 10 thru 16 spliced between 1 and 2, which a shell-glob will give you.
Here is a concatenation of all the screen resolution images into a single 14400x492 image: http://samwyse.googlepages.com/ssc2008-11b_medium.jpg
BTW, I created them from the caltech screen-res images using this Python script:
from PIL import Image
full = Image.new('RGB', (16*900, 492))
for i in range(16):
piece = Image.open('ssc2008-11b%d_medium.jpg' % (i+1))
full.paste(piece, (i*900, 0))
full.save('ssc2008-11b_medium.jpg')
I live in St. Louis and I'd like to take my kids to the convention center to see this thing. Is it somewhere that it can be viewed by the public, or do they expect full admission prices for three kids under 10?
I'm impressed. That's pretty simple, and it does exactly what I want. Opening every link that way is fine with me; I can always disable GM if I really need to. Or now that I see how easy it is, I may fix it to zap just the links in <div id="articles">.
/. and open every interesting link in a new tab. Then, while the pages are loading in the background, I go through and read them in chronological order.
I like to read
Hey! Any chance you could write a script to open /. links in a new window/tab? Thanks!
If we have that, then we have a decider for halting, or anything that reduces to halting, and the only decision we have to make is to repeat your overriding assertion. No, I don't make that assertion, because in practice I don't care that the decider itself may (apparently) never halt. The decider has three outputs: "Yes, it's good", "No, here's a list of the problems I've found", and "Can you give me another minute?"
Staic analysis is a lot like the traveling salesman problem. The fact that there's no general solution doesn't preclude the existence of useful tools. A static analysis just has to try to transform the program into a simpler one, and if it takes too long then we still have useful information.
with open('somefile', 'r') as f:
for line in f:
print reversed(line)
As long as the iterator returned by open halts, so does the program, which means that as long as 'somefile' isn't a symlink to
Also, if you have a thousand places you need to copy your "close the connection" block, that imples thousands of places where you're communicating with the database. Refactor all of those into a very few methods which include the "close connection" block, and you'll not only get fewer complaints from the static ananlysis tool, you're have better code as well.
I've got (and love) Dish Network's DVR (yeah, the one that just lost the patent infringement lawsuit from Tivo). It lets me skip ahead 60 secs and back 15 seconds, which works well for commercials. It also has a View button that skips all the way forward to the live feed (great if, during a commercial, I rewind to watch a cheer^H^H^H^H^H^Hscrimage in quarter speed slow-mo). Five minutes before it starts recording, it pops up a message box telling me that I can stay on the current show or go ahead and record the show that I'd scheduled. The models with only one tuner can only let you watch whatevers being recorded (or a priously made recording), but there are two tuner models that let you watch a live feed while recording another. A new feature was added this spring (via software download); now you can say that you want all episodes of, say, Mythbusters or just the ones flagged "new". In either case, it will skip any eps that are still on the hard drive. (So, if it records the 9pm episode, it will skip the repeat at 1am. Or, if a higher priority recording preempts Mythbusters at 9pm, it will pick it up at 1am instead. Yes, all of your recording rules get priorities to automatically resolve conflicts.)
You're assuming that /dev/random isn't buggy. A flaw in the implementation would render SSH insecure.
Like the Bell Labs jet pack, I fully expect to see this used at the beginning of the next James Bond movie.
Arrgh! The script uses the DB_File module, which I don't seem to have installed on any of my boxes. That's going to slow me down a bit.
The problem is, OpenSSL needed a buffer in which to XOR several sources of randomness, including /dev/random. OpenSSL didn't bother initializing the buffer, because doing so just eats CPU cycles, and a possibly random buffer is marginally better than a non-random one. However, the Debian patch removed *all* of the randomness except for the PID, leaving the user with one of just 262148 (or so) distinct keypairs. The tool that checks if your keys have been conpromised has a list of all of those keypairs and checks if your keypair appears.
The problem is, OpenSSL needed a buffer in which to XOR several sources of randomness. OpenSSL didn't bother initializing the buffer, because doing so just eats CPU cycles, and a possibly random buffer is marginally better than a non-random one. However, the patch removed *all* of the randomness except for the PID, leaving the user with one of just 262148 (or so) distinct keypairs.
Of course, I'm not sure of any way to make use of theat information. I'm thinking that I need to write a Firefox extension that reformats the
Yes, Apple should fix their software. Good luck getting that done. Yes, you shouldn't use broken software. But no one knew it was broken until they decided to start using a VCS. Yes, people have developed ways to work-around the problem. But it would be nice to have a system that worked out-of-the-box. Keeping your meta-data in a parallel tree is one way to do that.
I'm not sure that this isn't a trumped up use-case, but I wonder if it would be possible to have a parallel directory with all of the metadata in it, instead of using .svn directories. I understand that it's programatically convenient to be able to look at ./.svn/myfile wherever we are in the source tree, but things like the MacOS programs Keynote and Pages pro-actively remove .svn (and other) directories when they find them. Having a ~/.svn-meta directory that parallels the checked-out directory would be a good thing. VCS systems already know the 'base' of a project, so meta-data for $BASE/$PATH/myfile could be stored at ~/.svn-meta/$PATH/myfile, leaving a very clean checkout tree.
What you don't seem to realize is that these claims aren't based only on accidents involving humans. Lots of animal tests have also been done. You can look at what happens to an animal in very low pressure and in hard vacuum, and at what happens to humans in very low pressure, and make some good guesses about what will happen to a human in a hard vacuum. And the truth is that, yea, the difference in absolute pressure is about a million times, but that still translates to just a few microbars. What's important is the difference between the presure inside your skin and the pressure outside, and a difference of microbars just doesn't make much difference.