why do people feel the need to shoot DNA into each other and create more irritating, messy, smelly financial boat anchors?
I'll leave the 'feel the need' part alone and note that while the little people are irritating, messy, smelly and expensive, I can't imagine a better use for my time or my money.
If money and time aren't for lavishing on the people you love, what good are they?
Getting free software for windows is *not* the easy way. Just get a live CD like Mepis or Knoppix, boot it up and try it out.
You'll get all kinds of software quickly and correctly installed. If there are incompatabilities you'll know right away. If you are generally impressed--- and I think these distributions are getting very impressive--- you have a good head start.
If you aren't generally impressed, you can look into anything that caught your eye and see if its ported to your OS of choice.
If SCO owns part of Linux they could license that part. But licensing that part would disallow the GPL allowing use of the rest of the kernel. A license from SCO alone--- to a tiny (at most) part of a system is absolutely worthless without the rest of the system--- even assuming they didn't GPL the mythical tiny part they claim to own.
Unless MS is forced to remove IE from Windows as default IE will remain in the dominant position regardless of which browser has the best features.
Its commonly beleived that users won't upgrade their browsers; but its not true. MacOSX has mostly shipped with IE; the most common browser now is Safari. See here
and here. The change happened too fast to be thru new installs.
Mostly you are right: apps should have one true home. sh should always be in/bin, etc.
But, occasionally its nice to have two versions of something installed, for testing or legacy reasons. For these purposes its neccessary to move one of the versions.
OS X seems to me to fail in the other direction--- yes, its easy to have two versions, but its cumbersome to do the more typical case: ie I want to upgrade foo and not have to worry about the users' shortcut bars pointing to the old version.
Rechargability is NOT an argument against standard batteries. You can easily and cheaply get NiMH AAA batteries. Lets go over the pros and cons of standard versus nonstandard batteries.
Cons:
(Optional)One time $20 expense for charger and NiMH batteries. If you have a proprietary rechargable battery this cost was included in your purchase.
Pros:
Spare disposable batteries are available at any convenience store just about anywhere in the world.
Spare rechargeable batteries are available. Often proprietary batteries are built in to the device--- so the device is out of service while being recharged.
Standard batteries use the same rechargers as the batteries for your other devices. This means you don't have to sort thru a drawerful of funky rechargers to find the one you want. If it wasn't left in some hotel.
When the standard rechargable batteries wear out they can be replaced without doing a research project to track down the expensive replacements. And the device is useful in the mean time.
There's no reason to use sftp for publically available files. This is for the exact same reason that you wouldn't use https. There's no need for encyption of something that is freely, publically available. Checksums, yes, encryption, no.
There is a reason to use https for publicly available stuff--- to prevent server spoofing. Assuming that you consider Verisign to be a trusted authority:^)
Of course, it only gets the client some certainty: the server could have been compromised, etc.
You like all these programs (except the F18E)?!?! Ok. Lets do a blow by blow.
First the context: we spend more than the next, what, 6 nations combined. No other nation has a navy to speak of. We already have the best fighter planes and nobody else is making a better one. (The Eurofighter ain't). There is no threat to US superiority in the blue sky or the blue sea.
RAH-66 Comanche ($.9B). Recon helocopter. Drones do recon more effectively and more safely at lower cost.
F-22 Raptor ($5.2) There is no reason to build this plane. There are no Mig-33s for it to fight. The F-16 is as good as any non-Nato fighter, we have more of them, better coordination and our pilots are better. And the F-16 isn't our best existing interceptor. We just don't need a new interceptor.
Navy's F-18E/F ($3.3) Should they wait for the JSF? Yes.
Strike Fighter/F-35 ($3.5) If $50m/plane is the best they can do now before the invitable cost overruns and purchase reductions, the drone will likely have them beat for most missions by 2008.
V-22 Osprey ($2) Nice idea. Too bad it doesn't work.
the DDG-51 ($2.7B) Why they don't call them crusiers, I have no idea.
Virginia class attack submarine ($2.5B) Who, exactly, are they going to attack? No other nation has a navy in the ballpark as our surface ships and sureface ships are dual purpose. Besides, batteries powered subs are better in the littorals-- where commandos want to be. We are sending the excellent Los Angeles class to early retirement to make room for these guys. We should be sending the Los Angeles class into retirement 'cause they don't have a freakin mission.
the Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile ($.6B) Um guys, the cold war? its over.
the Crusader artillery system ($.4B) Many think this is obsoleted by the end of the cold war.
No pork in the military budget? Nope, nothing here but us pigs.
There were a total of at least 198 vernacular editions of the Bible before the first Protestant edition. When it eventually came, Luther's edition didn't include the whole work--- most glaringly, he omited the books that most strongly contradicted his beliefs. Its not suprising that his translation was not a hit with the Catholic church.
Of course, with the central role the bible has in Chistianity, its not surprising that there is dispute over the quality of translation--- even today many English speaking Christians have a single acceptable translation (usually the King James).
Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 1
Few of these patterns were new to me, but that doesn't mean they are unimportant. Having a standard jargon (aka techspeak) is very valuable. The jargon helps with communication which leads to more (productive) conversionsion which leads to better designs. "I used a chain of Decorators produced by an Abstract Factory similarly to what we did in project foo" says alot to a coworker and leads directly to the interesting bits--- where this project is different and why. Its also helpful when implementing a pattern rarely used to go and look up the implementation issues in this book and see if any have been overlooked.
No, the reading is better than M*N (where N is the number of elements and M is the key space.) The reading is O(M+N). It has two parts: going through the top level buckets (M reads). Where the top level bucket is full, decend down the chain until the chain ends. This takes N reads. So reading the array takes O(N+M).
Allocating/initializing/garbage collecting the array may take O(N*M), depending on the implementation. A different implementation could skip the array and use a list off of the M different buckets, reducing the memory usage to O(N+M) and improving performance similarly.
Speed is not a irrelevant item. First, speed is important both as a mesure of and a means to attain mastery. That is to say if you've really learned something you can do it quickly. And if you can do it quickly, you have really learned it. Multiplication tables would be the cannonical example; but educational mastery should be the rule, not the exception.
Second, from a software engineering point of view, speed is hardly irrelevant either. One of the main problems in software engineering is that the communication overhead in a programming team is O(N^2) where N is the team size. That means that people who work twice as quickly form teams that are more than twice as effective.
Your comment about comments is well taken. Comments explaining the rationales of code are very important for maintainablity.
Code under a deadline doesn't neccessarly get less design. After all, good design can help speed coding, provided the design itself is produced quickly. Besides, Worse is Better and refactoring is your friend.
So, provided grades refect readiblity and
commenting, I think time pressures are a good thing in an educational setting--- and in a commercial setting too, provided they don't smother refactoring.
-Tupper
A considered list with footnotes
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've shut my cable modem off. I could live with
the upload caps--- but if there are going to be caps then dump the rules of service that won't allow webservers, vpns etc. Always on was a feature I like--- but they took away my reasons for liking it.
Its version 1.2.3, but its been patched by debian. This hole has been fixed in stable since feb 11 on
security.debian.org (deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free)
and since april 17 in unpatched potato >= 2.2r3
(deb ftp://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US potato non-US/main)
potato is getting quite long in the tooth, but the security patches are timely.
I don't agree that this is the way Open Source should go, but that's the reality of it.
If you don't think there is
a good enough Open Source solution to this (or any other issue), well, you've got the compiler, so use the source. Don't complain about them--- there is no them--- there is only us.
If the stock price also stagnates then large investors are going to demand a piece of the revenue pie (in the form of dividends)
No. Dividends are inefficent tax wise. A better run no-growth company will often buy back stock. This will have the same effect: money from the company is redistributed to stock holders. Only that money is taxed at the lower capital gains rate.
This strategy also has the side effect of increasing the value of the corporate officers'
stock options.
It's simple to defeat stenography detection. you saturate the detector to the point where the real items get through.
Only, if that infomation isn't dectable, you may not want it there for other reasons. For
instance mp3 and ogg try to drop information that listeners won't detect for reasons of efficent respresentation. I expect these types of lossy methods will get better (ie less undetectable information that can safely be dropped) over time, particularly where the original information was analog.
The 10% miss rate in and of itself should still represent plausable deniability. If you take standard legal practices, a 90% probability of a "match" is still weak enough that it would require other supporting evidence, circumstantial or otherwise to present a reasonable case.
The tricky bit isn't that 10% of the tampered files are undetected. It's that 10% of the vastly larger pool of untampered files are falsely detected.[1]
For instance if 5% of the
source files have been tampered; and the chance of false negatives and positves are 10% each,
then 14% (=.05*.9+.95*.1) show up as a positive. So, given that the test shows positive, there is less than only a one in 3 chance that the file actually was tampered with. In practice the rate of tampering is much lower than 5%; and the conditional probability of a tested positive indicating an actual positive will be correspondingly lower.
[1] The article didn't distinguish these
error types and the 90% may only refer to the false negative rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Happy To help clear that up,
Tupper
I'll leave the 'feel the need' part alone and note that while the little people are irritating, messy, smelly and expensive, I can't imagine a better use for my time or my money.
If money and time aren't for lavishing on the people you love, what good are they?
Cheers,
Tupper
I'm guessing you didn't see the original Mad Max. Heck, Attack Of The Lucas Clones would have been better than that one!
You'll get all kinds of software quickly and correctly installed. If there are incompatabilities you'll know right away. If you are generally impressed--- and I think these distributions are getting very impressive--- you have a good head start.
If you aren't generally impressed, you can look into anything that caught your eye and see if its ported to your OS of choice.
-Tupper
Another place to look is your college alumni association. Some of them offer these plans which look pretty good to me.
If SCO owns part of Linux they could license that part. But licensing that part would disallow the GPL allowing use of the rest of the kernel. A license from SCO alone--- to a tiny (at most) part of a system is absolutely worthless without the rest of the system--- even assuming they didn't GPL the mythical tiny part they claim to own.
Its commonly beleived that users won't upgrade their browsers; but its not true. MacOSX has mostly shipped with IE; the most common browser now is Safari. See here and here. The change happened too fast to be thru new installs.
But, occasionally its nice to have two versions of something installed, for testing or legacy reasons. For these purposes its neccessary to move one of the versions.
OS X seems to me to fail in the other direction--- yes, its easy to have two versions, but its cumbersome to do the more typical case: ie I want to upgrade foo and not have to worry about the users' shortcut bars pointing to the old version.
Cons:
- (Optional)One time $20 expense for charger and NiMH batteries. If you have a proprietary rechargable battery this cost was included in your purchase.
Pros:- Spare disposable batteries are available at any convenience store just about anywhere in the world.
- Spare rechargeable batteries are available. Often proprietary batteries are built in to the device--- so the device is out of service while being recharged.
- Standard batteries use the same rechargers as the batteries for your other devices. This means you don't have to sort thru a drawerful of funky rechargers to find the one you want. If it wasn't left in some hotel.
- When the standard rechargable batteries wear out they can be replaced without doing a research project to track down the expensive replacements. And the device is useful in the mean time.
You make the call.There is a reason to use https for publicly available stuff--- to prevent server spoofing. Assuming that you consider Verisign to be a trusted authority :^)
Of course, it only gets the client some certainty: the server could have been compromised, etc.
First the context: we spend more than the next, what, 6 nations combined. No other nation has a navy to speak of. We already have the best fighter planes and nobody else is making a better one. (The Eurofighter ain't). There is no threat to US superiority in the blue sky or the blue sea.
- RAH-66 Comanche ($.9B). Recon helocopter. Drones do recon more effectively and more safely at lower cost.
- F-22 Raptor ($5.2) There is no reason to build this plane. There are no Mig-33s for it to fight. The F-16 is as good as any non-Nato fighter, we have more of them, better coordination and our pilots are better. And the F-16 isn't our best existing interceptor. We just don't need a new interceptor.
- Navy's F-18E/F ($3.3) Should they wait for the JSF? Yes.
- Strike Fighter/F-35 ($3.5) If $50m/plane is the best they can do now before the invitable cost overruns and purchase reductions, the drone will likely have them beat for most missions by 2008.
- V-22 Osprey ($2) Nice idea. Too bad it doesn't work.
- the DDG-51 ($2.7B) Why they don't call them crusiers, I have no idea.
- Virginia class attack submarine ($2.5B) Who, exactly, are they going to attack? No other nation has a navy in the ballpark as our surface ships and sureface ships are dual purpose. Besides, batteries powered subs are better in the littorals-- where commandos want to be. We are sending the excellent Los Angeles class to early retirement to make room for these guys. We should be sending the Los Angeles class into retirement 'cause they don't have a freakin mission.
- the Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile ($.6B) Um guys, the cold war? its over.
- the Crusader artillery system ($.4B) Many think this is obsoleted by the end of the cold war.
No pork in the military budget? Nope, nothing here but us pigs.Sheesh.
If you are gonna nitpick you might note that there were 19 "Catholic" editions of the Bible printed in German before Luther. 14 in High German:
-
Strasburg: 1466, 1470, 1485,
- Basel, Switzerland: 1474,
- Augsburg: 1473 (2),1477 (2), 1480, 1487, 1490, 1507, 1518,
- Nuremburg: 1483.
Bible editions into Low German include:-
Cologne: 1480 (2)
- Lubeck: 1494
- Halberstadt: 1522
- Delf: before 1522
There were a total of at least 198 vernacular editions of the Bible before the first Protestant edition. When it eventually came, Luther's edition didn't include the whole work--- most glaringly, he omited the books that most strongly contradicted his beliefs. Its not suprising that his translation was not a hit with the Catholic church.Of course, with the central role the bible has in Chistianity, its not surprising that there is dispute over the quality of translation--- even today many English speaking Christians have a single acceptable translation (usually the King James).
Also, patterns are fun.
Allocating/initializing/garbage collecting the array may take O(N*M), depending on the implementation. A different implementation could skip the array and use a list off of the M different buckets, reducing the memory usage to O(N+M) and improving performance similarly.
Happy Hacking,
Tupper
Second, from a software engineering point of view, speed is hardly irrelevant either. One of the main problems in software engineering is that the communication overhead in a programming team is O(N^2) where N is the team size. That means that people who work twice as quickly form teams that are more than twice as effective.
Your comment about comments is well taken. Comments explaining the rationales of code are very important for maintainablity.
Code under a deadline doesn't neccessarly get less design. After all, good design can help speed coding, provided the design itself is produced quickly. Besides, Worse is Better and refactoring is your friend.
So, provided grades refect readiblity and commenting, I think time pressures are a good thing in an educational setting--- and in a commercial setting too, provided they don't smother refactoring.
-Tupper
is at The Computer Science Hall of Fame
Not only does google sort it--- the wayback machine does backups. That's what I call best of breed solutions.
The world wide web is still very strange after all these years. -
I've shut my cable modem off. I could live with the upload caps--- but if there are going to be caps then dump the rules of service that won't allow webservers, vpns etc. Always on was a feature I like--- but they took away my reasons for liking it.
(deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free)
and since april 17 in unpatched potato >= 2.2r3
(deb ftp://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US potato non-US/main)
potato is getting quite long in the tooth, but the security patches are timely.
If you don't think there is a good enough Open Source solution to this (or any other issue), well, you've got the compiler, so use the source. Don't complain about them--- there is no them--- there is only us.
You should check out the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery. They have a FAQ
No. Dividends are inefficent tax wise. A better run no-growth company will often buy back stock. This will have the same effect: money from the company is redistributed to stock holders. Only that money is taxed at the lower capital gains rate.
This strategy also has the side effect of increasing the value of the corporate officers' stock options.
Only, if that infomation isn't dectable, you may not want it there for other reasons. For instance mp3 and ogg try to drop information that listeners won't detect for reasons of efficent respresentation. I expect these types of lossy methods will get better (ie less undetectable information that can safely be dropped) over time, particularly where the original information was analog.
The tricky bit isn't that 10% of the tampered files are undetected. It's that 10% of the vastly larger pool of untampered files are falsely detected.[1]
For instance if 5% of the source files have been tampered; and the chance of false negatives and positves are 10% each, then 14% (=.05*.9+.95*.1) show up as a positive. So, given that the test shows positive, there is less than only a one in 3 chance that the file actually was tampered with. In practice the rate of tampering is much lower than 5%; and the conditional probability of a tested positive indicating an actual positive will be correspondingly lower.
[1] The article didn't distinguish these error types and the 90% may only refer to the false negative rate.