Did you also know that if that RJ-11 is active and plugged into a NIC, the phone lines die?
That's not quite true. RJ-11 fits into RJ-45 by design, and ethernet doesn't use the middle two wires. I believe the original intent was to allow phone and ethernet to run over the same cable.
Of course, if you have a secondary phone line, or a digital phone system, then who knows?
So they would just get someone else to do it, and possibly throw you in prison for good measure. In 1975, 170,000 died as a result of a cascade of dam failures. The hydrologist who had recommended changes was sent away. When he was proven right, he was brought back, then sent away again (1961). He was brought back again after the disaster.
If they are taking into account redundancy in all files on all the computers being backed up, and doing so transparently, then that's a huge win. I could easily see 25:1 even without any new algorithms. Imagine skipping more than just redundant DLLs. If Bob writes a report and sends it to 30 coworkers who each make revisions and send them back, followed by Bob integrating those revisions back into the document and forwarding the final result to an additional 300 people, it doesn't need to take up much more space than the size of the original document plus the difference between it and the final version. Sure you can use file servers to manage some of that redundancy, but then you have a manual process that can never be anywhere near as efficient.
However, backing up all the redundant DLLs would also be done, and it suggests one additional benefit. It now becomes possible to back up the entire contents of an arbitrarily large number of machines for very little more space than just backing up all the user files. You then have the ability to restore any one of a very large number of machines to the state it was in during any incremental backup you still have around.
It looks like they are doing a type of dictionary encoding, but using a hashtable for the dictionary and keeping it in memory. That way, each hash entry points to a chunk of data, and the actual files consist of hash entries followed by differences.
I don't know how well it would work on a small scale. I can, however, see where they could get huge compression ratios out of a multi-terabyte backup system. In a big company, There's going to be a lot of redundancy across multiple user's files, and in multiple revisions of any single user's files. There will probably also be a lot of duplicates of compressed or encrypted files. While compressed or encrypted data itself can't be compressed, multiple copies of the same file can certainly be compressed down to not much more than the size of one.
It's a special case, in that you get 25x compression only when storing massive amounts of multi-user business related data, and I'm sure it won't work for everybody even then, but it's also a useful special case. If I had 50,000 desktop PCs to back up nightly, I would be very interested.
I always figured Google was doing something like this in GMail.
but Sturgeon's law applies to all possible subsets of everything. After removing the 90% crap, you will quickly discover that 90% of what you have left is now crap.
Luke grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, ignorant of who he was, and of pretty much everything else except vaporator maintenance and sand. Here's a few potential plot ideas:
Every once in a while, some nutjob hermit wanders in to check on him. Maybe he's demented. Maybe he's just some old pervert. His uncle seems to know something, but refuses to talk about it.
Sometimes, a vaporator breaks down.
Those Jawas can certainly be annoying!
A severe sandstorm traps everyone inside for a few days. Members of the Skywalker clan look back on the past season's events with mixed emotions.
On a very special episode, Biggs has gone to the academy. His girlfriend starts catting around for someone to take the edge off her loneliness. Does Luke tell Biggs? When she tries to corner Luke, he decides he should do the right thing. That's when he finds out Biggs really left to be with Wedge, far away from small towns with small minds. The girl moves on to other prey. In a subplot, Uncle Owen seems a lot happier these days, and his aunt's mysterious headaches have stopped.
Luke gets accepted into the academy. His whining finally annoys his uncle enough to buy a couple of droids to help out. But his tightwad uncle buys the cheapest, most useless piece of shit droids he can find. The first is a 35 year old astromech built for hull maintenance and little else. It has no speech capability and severely limited mobility on anything bumpier than freshly laid tarmac. The second is an equally ancient protocol droid that looks like it was built from spare parts by a 10 year old boy. It therefore comes as no surprise when the astromech blows a fuse and takes off into the desert.
On second thought, that last one might be a good way to start a movie.
Why do we care how much it weighs without batteries or a strap? If it's 7 ounces without, then it will probably be at least a pound. These are not optional accessories. It's going to get heavy real fast.
I sprained my ring finger on this one. You hold the base in your hand with tension from the third finger. My hands would sweat, and it would start to slip if I didn't hold it tightly enough.
Also, there was almost no way to use any other buttons without taking my hand off the stick. I remember one game where I would play while holding the stick about my keyboard. I would use the space bar as the second button, and hit it with my left knuckle.
Except for the black and white buttons, which are no better in the S-controller.
The diamond layout enabled me to hit practically any button combination just by rocking my thumb. It was great for Ninja Gaiden and SSX.
Additionally, I occasionally have RSI problems with my wrists, but I could use the original controller for hours without any problems. My hands aren't especially big, either. (for an adult male) By contrast, I can only use an S-controller, or worse, a PS2 DualShock controller for limited periods.
Optometrists have been spotting early signs of diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer, hypertension, high cholesterol, stroke, heart disease, herpes simplex and thyroid problems for decades. Still, it's nice that this system allows for more precise quantification of the illness, and it's nice that it can be done without an optometrist on hand, but the fact that such things can be diagnosed by examining the retina is not news.
The suggestions I have seen here so far seem to boil down to "Don't do it that way". Sometimes that's not possible. If it truly has to be C++, and it truly has to be as fast as possible and as bug free as possible, there are a few guidelines that can help:
1. Unless the GUI will be I/O bound, and that's unlikely, try to write it in a safer language that has better GUI support.
2. Make all your classes small and simple, and create test harnesses that are as complete as possible. Try to make the classes simple enough that they can be individually tested in such a way that all code paths are exercised.
3. Check your arguments. This includes checking for invalid combinations, and arguments that are invalid given the state of the object.
4. Don't use new or pointers directly. If there may be multiple references to an object, then reference count it and create handle classes that hold the references so all instantiation is controlled, and all destruction is implicit. Make these handles STL compatible, and never pass around pointers to them.
5. Try to design the application to fail fast and recover from failure. For example, maintain the state of work being done in discrete transactions that can be aborted if a failure is detected. This can be on disk or in memory depending on your performance needs. This could be combined with the ability to restart the app in a new process and have it pick up where the last one left off.
6. Have the app keep track of its memory usage, and be prepared to recover from memory leaks, possibly by restarting as in item 5.
7. If the compiler you're using supports structured exceptions, then use them. They can degrade performance a bit, but they can also enable you to recover from NULL pointer exceptions.
8. If you have multiple threads, then to avoid both the performance hit from context switches and the chance of deadlocks, don't let them access the same data directly. Instead, have them communicate through lock free queue structures. That way, all your main threads can pretty much spin freely. Spawn worker threads for any I/O or other operations that can block. A context switch can take as much time as thousands of instructions. You want to use as much of every time slice as possible.
9. Keep the number of main threads down to the number of CPU's or less. That way, except for the times when the CPU is being used by the OS or other processes, (should be relatively rare) each non blocked thread gets its own CPU.
10. Have an experienced QA team, that understands their job goes beyond unit testing.
Now here's a few that are always important, but for what you want to do, they become critical.
11. Have the design laid out at least roughly before you start.
12. If at all possible, don't let requirements change in midstream.
13. Overestimate the time it will take very generously. You will probably still be crunched.
No, I haven't read the book. I don't much like the guy, and don't have any motivation to do so.
You're right. In an infinite universe, there exists the remote possibility that the letter says what you think it says. However, it requires imposing meaning that isn't hinted at in any way to a document that, while heated, is perfectly reasonable in context. There is no hard proof one way or another. So congratulations. I admit that it's just barely possible for you to be correct. I also admit the remote possibility that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor, that the women burned in Salem were really witches, and that their judges knew they were innocent. I've simply chosen not to see evil in actions that can be adequately explained without it.
I see I was incorrect. You are capable of admitting error. However, I also notice that you conceded on a narrow, and strictly factual point. You also felt the need to follow it up by reinforcing your main argument. Don't feel too bad, that's what I'm doing right now.
I've read a lot of his books. He's a smart rich bastard with a lack of certain business ethics and morals.
That certainly appears to be the case.
Would I want to be him? You bet.
Good news! Here's your chance:
It's 1976. You've devoted a substantial chunk of time to developing a piece of software in the hopes of making a little money selling it. Your software receives a great deal of praise, and becomes the killer app for a successful, if primitive, pc. You receive tons of letters telling you how wonderful your software is.
The tangible benefits to you for all your effort amount to, "let's see, 10% of nothing is, let's do the math, nothing and nothing, carry the nothing...[Jayne]".
Your outrageously unreasonable response, which is, of course, motivated by pure evil, is to write a letter laying into all those fucking freeloaders.
Of course, all this could have been predicted by all the books you wrote before 1976 outlining your business philosophy and lack of ethics.
Wait, you mean those books were written after 1976? What could possibly have motivated them? The world may never know.
refute my assumptions about his motives
On their face, the quotes do not say or imply what you claim. You state directly that you used his books as background material. The books you cite were written by a successful business man whose opinions were built on the experience of building a successful (and profitable) software company. Are they really that useful when looking for a (very deeply) buried subtext in a letter written by a college kid just trying to make a buck with his own two hands? Does it help that the letter was written to a community of people who consider themselves his fans but are really just a bunch of assholes?
I love good arguments and I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong
Bullshit. You might admit it if God came down and beat the truth into you with a stick. Even then, you would struggle.
"to brick" already has the meaning of using bricks to block something off. for example, bricking up a window.
If were to "brick up a building", you would not be turning it into brick or building it out of brick. You would either be enclosing it in brick, or walling off all entrances and windows.
I think "to brickify" is clearer in this case since the suffix indicates a literal or figural transformation.
Towards this end, may I suggest a new TiVo feature: The ability to play back a program at a higher speed, with the audio pitch remaining unchanged. Hey, Kaffeine (in KDE) does it for me all the time, which I find very useful when watching non-pr0n, such as a physics lecture where the speaker talks v e r y - s l o w l y.
MythTV can do this. It also does a pretty good job of finding and skipping commercials. You can adjust the speed from 0.5x to 2.0x in increments of 0.05x. I do this when I'm watching documentaries. A 1 hour program takes about 25 minutes.
Of course, getting the silly thing to work was an incredible PITA.
I swear to God, if Bill Gates showed up tomorrow and gave $100 million to combat AIDS in India, there would be some shlub on/. claiming he only did it to boost Windows sales. Oh, wait:
Are you seriously suggesting that speaking up for Gates in any way for any reason is tantamount to speaking up for a a child molester?
I suspect that Godwin's law is due for an expansion.
For the record, there are plenty of things I don't like about Microsoft, their products, their business practices, etc, etc, etc. There's also a few choice comments I could make regarding Linux GUI's, Linux installation, Linux configuration, Linux drivers, Linux documentation, and Linux fans. All my friends who prefer Windows think I'm a Linux weenie, while all my friends who prefer Linux think I'm a Windows apologist. I know both systems very well. I simply refuse to view the world through a veil of hatred.
The article describes Sony's new patent, and then speculates on one possible use for it. Everyone here seems to have their panties in a bunch based on that alone.
Sony is a large company that is actively involved in DRM research.
Sony files a patent for some DRM technology.
The PS3 will be out RSN.
Therefore The PS3 will incorporate said technology.
In this case, there is pretty much zero danger of someone mistaking a security product called "Windows Defender" from a small software outfit in Australia for the flagship full-scale operating system from the most famous software vendor in the world.
Really? I find the following to be a perfectly reasonable conversation:
"Hi, I'm having trouble with your website. Windows Defender won't let my browser load it."
"I'm very sorry sir, but I'm unfamiliar with that particular application, and I'm afraid I don't see it on our list of apps for which we guarantee interoperability. I suggest you contact Microsoft support. Maybe they can help you."
As far as I understand it, it's all about the domain of the product. You can make a product and call it windows or windows 'something' as long as it's not a computer based product. Similarly to how there's Apple Computers and Apple Records, the Beatles-founded record company. As soon as Apple Computers started getting into the music biz, they had to field suits from Apple Records.
translation: Based on law and past precedent, Microsoft has a valid claim.
Anyway, it's a dick move from MS. Even though the programmers Windows Defender software had been defunct for a few years, they should have paid him for the name.
translation: Even though he hadn't been using the name for several years, they should have given him money anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite true. RJ-11 fits into RJ-45 by design, and ethernet doesn't use the middle two wires. I believe the original intent was to allow phone and ethernet to run over the same cable.
Of course, if you have a secondary phone line, or a digital phone system, then who knows?
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Why does your luggage need to match?
If they are taking into account redundancy in all files on all the computers being backed up, and doing so transparently, then that's a huge win. I could easily see 25:1 even without any new algorithms. Imagine skipping more than just redundant DLLs. If Bob writes a report and sends it to 30 coworkers who each make revisions and send them back, followed by Bob integrating those revisions back into the document and forwarding the final result to an additional 300 people, it doesn't need to take up much more space than the size of the original document plus the difference between it and the final version. Sure you can use file servers to manage some of that redundancy, but then you have a manual process that can never be anywhere near as efficient.
However, backing up all the redundant DLLs would also be done, and it suggests one additional benefit. It now becomes possible to back up the entire contents of an arbitrarily large number of machines for very little more space than just backing up all the user files. You then have the ability to restore any one of a very large number of machines to the state it was in during any incremental backup you still have around.
It looks like they are doing a type of dictionary encoding, but using a hashtable for the dictionary and keeping it in memory. That way, each hash entry points to a chunk of data, and the actual files consist of hash entries followed by differences.
I don't know how well it would work on a small scale. I can, however, see where they could get huge compression ratios out of a multi-terabyte backup system. In a big company, There's going to be a lot of redundancy across multiple user's files, and in multiple revisions of any single user's files. There will probably also be a lot of duplicates of compressed or encrypted files. While compressed or encrypted data itself can't be compressed, multiple copies of the same file can certainly be compressed down to not much more than the size of one.
It's a special case, in that you get 25x compression only when storing massive amounts of multi-user business related data, and I'm sure it won't work for everybody even then, but it's also a useful special case. If I had 50,000 desktop PCs to back up nightly, I would be very interested.
I always figured Google was doing something like this in GMail.
but Sturgeon's law applies to all possible subsets of everything. After removing the 90% crap, you will quickly discover that 90% of what you have left is now crap.
Luke grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, ignorant of who he was, and of pretty much everything else except vaporator maintenance and sand. Here's a few potential plot ideas:
Every once in a while, some nutjob hermit wanders in to check on him. Maybe he's demented. Maybe he's just some old pervert. His uncle seems to know something, but refuses to talk about it.
Sometimes, a vaporator breaks down.
Those Jawas can certainly be annoying!
A severe sandstorm traps everyone inside for a few days. Members of the Skywalker clan look back on the past season's events with mixed emotions.
On a very special episode, Biggs has gone to the academy. His girlfriend starts catting around for someone to take the edge off her loneliness. Does Luke tell Biggs? When she tries to corner Luke, he decides he should do the right thing. That's when he finds out Biggs really left to be with Wedge, far away from small towns with small minds. The girl moves on to other prey. In a subplot, Uncle Owen seems a lot happier these days, and his aunt's mysterious headaches have stopped.
Luke gets accepted into the academy. His whining finally annoys his uncle enough to buy a couple of droids to help out. But his tightwad uncle buys the cheapest, most useless piece of shit droids he can find. The first is a 35 year old astromech built for hull maintenance and little else. It has no speech capability and severely limited mobility on anything bumpier than freshly laid tarmac. The second is an equally ancient protocol droid that looks like it was built from spare parts by a 10 year old boy. It therefore comes as no surprise when the astromech blows a fuse and takes off into the desert.
On second thought, that last one might be a good way to start a movie.
Why do we care how much it weighs without batteries or a strap? If it's 7 ounces without, then it will probably be at least a pound. These are not optional accessories. It's going to get heavy real fast.
I sprained my ring finger on this one. You hold the base in your hand with tension from the third finger. My hands would sweat, and it would start to slip if I didn't hold it tightly enough.
Also, there was almost no way to use any other buttons without taking my hand off the stick. I remember one game where I would play while holding the stick about my keyboard. I would use the space bar as the second button, and hit it with my left knuckle.
Except for the black and white buttons, which are no better in the S-controller.
The diamond layout enabled me to hit practically any button combination just by rocking my thumb. It was great for Ninja Gaiden and SSX.
Additionally, I occasionally have RSI problems with my wrists, but I could use the original controller for hours without any problems. My hands aren't especially big, either. (for an adult male) By contrast, I can only use an S-controller, or worse, a PS2 DualShock controller for limited periods.
Optometrists have been spotting early signs of diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer, hypertension, high cholesterol, stroke, heart disease, herpes simplex and thyroid problems for decades. Still, it's nice that this system allows for more precise quantification of the illness, and it's nice that it can be done without an optometrist on hand, but the fact that such things can be diagnosed by examining the retina is not news.
The suggestions I have seen here so far seem to boil down to "Don't do it that way". Sometimes that's not possible. If it truly has to be C++, and it truly has to be as fast as possible and as bug free as possible, there are a few guidelines that can help:
1. Unless the GUI will be I/O bound, and that's unlikely, try to write it in a safer language that has better GUI support.
2. Make all your classes small and simple, and create test harnesses that are as complete as possible. Try to make the classes simple enough that they can be individually tested in such a way that all code paths are exercised.
3. Check your arguments. This includes checking for invalid combinations, and arguments that are invalid given the state of the object.
4. Don't use new or pointers directly. If there may be multiple references to an object, then reference count it and create handle classes that hold the references so all instantiation is controlled, and all destruction is implicit. Make these handles STL compatible, and never pass around pointers to them.
5. Try to design the application to fail fast and recover from failure. For example, maintain the state of work being done in discrete transactions that can be aborted if a failure is detected. This can be on disk or in memory depending on your performance needs. This could be combined with the ability to restart the app in a new process and have it pick up where the last one left off.
6. Have the app keep track of its memory usage, and be prepared to recover from memory leaks, possibly by restarting as in item 5.
7. If the compiler you're using supports structured exceptions, then use them. They can degrade performance a bit, but they can also enable you to recover from NULL pointer exceptions.
8. If you have multiple threads, then to avoid both the performance hit from context switches and the chance of deadlocks, don't let them access the same data directly. Instead, have them communicate through lock free queue structures. That way, all your main threads can pretty much spin freely. Spawn worker threads for any I/O or other operations that can block. A context switch can take as much time as thousands of instructions. You want to use as much of every time slice as possible.
9. Keep the number of main threads down to the number of CPU's or less. That way, except for the times when the CPU is being used by the OS or other processes, (should be relatively rare) each non blocked thread gets its own CPU.
10. Have an experienced QA team, that understands their job goes beyond unit testing.
Now here's a few that are always important, but for what you want to do, they become critical.
11. Have the design laid out at least roughly before you start.
12. If at all possible, don't let requirements change in midstream.
13. Overestimate the time it will take very generously. You will probably still be crunched.
You're right. What he actually said was "I think my wife is a fat slag".
You're right. In an infinite universe, there exists the remote possibility that the letter says what you think it says. However, it requires imposing meaning that isn't hinted at in any way to a document that, while heated, is perfectly reasonable in context. There is no hard proof one way or another. So congratulations. I admit that it's just barely possible for you to be correct. I also admit the remote possibility that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor, that the women burned in Salem were really witches, and that their judges knew they were innocent. I've simply chosen not to see evil in actions that can be adequately explained without it.
I see I was incorrect. You are capable of admitting error. However, I also notice that you conceded on a narrow, and strictly factual point. You also felt the need to follow it up by reinforcing your main argument. Don't feel too bad, that's what I'm doing right now.
That certainly appears to be the case.
Would I want to be him? You bet.
Good news! Here's your chance:
It's 1976. You've devoted a substantial chunk of time to developing a piece of software in the hopes of making a little money selling it. Your software receives a great deal of praise, and becomes the killer app for a successful, if primitive, pc. You receive tons of letters telling you how wonderful your software is.
The tangible benefits to you for all your effort amount to, "let's see, 10% of nothing is, let's do the math, nothing and nothing, carry the nothing...[Jayne]".
Your outrageously unreasonable response, which is, of course, motivated by pure evil, is to write a letter laying into all those fucking freeloaders.
Of course, all this could have been predicted by all the books you wrote before 1976 outlining your business philosophy and lack of ethics.
Wait, you mean those books were written after 1976? What could possibly have motivated them? The world may never know.
refute my assumptions about his motives
On their face, the quotes do not say or imply what you claim. You state directly that you used his books as background material. The books you cite were written by a successful business man whose opinions were built on the experience of building a successful (and profitable) software company. Are they really that useful when looking for a (very deeply) buried subtext in a letter written by a college kid just trying to make a buck with his own two hands? Does it help that the letter was written to a community of people who consider themselves his fans but are really just a bunch of assholes?
I love good arguments and I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong
Bullshit. You might admit it if God came down and beat the truth into you with a stick. Even then, you would struggle.
How much more refutation do you require?
Hmm...
"to brick" already has the meaning of using bricks to block something off. for example, bricking up a window.
If were to "brick up a building", you would not be turning it into brick or building it out of brick. You would either be enclosing it in brick, or walling off all entrances and windows.
I think "to brickify" is clearer in this case since the suffix indicates a literal or figural transformation.
MythTV can do this. It also does a pretty good job of finding and skipping commercials. You can adjust the speed from 0.5x to 2.0x in increments of 0.05x. I do this when I'm watching documentaries. A 1 hour program takes about 25 minutes.
Of course, getting the silly thing to work was an incredible PITA.
I swear to God, if Bill Gates showed up tomorrow and gave $100 million to combat AIDS in India, there would be some shlub on /. claiming he only did it to boost Windows sales. Oh, wait:
Are you seriously suggesting that speaking up for Gates in any way for any reason is tantamount to speaking up for a a child molester?I suspect that Godwin's law is due for an expansion.
For the record, there are plenty of things I don't like about Microsoft, their products, their business practices, etc, etc, etc. There's also a few choice comments I could make regarding Linux GUI's, Linux installation, Linux configuration, Linux drivers, Linux documentation, and Linux fans. All my friends who prefer Windows think I'm a Linux weenie, while all my friends who prefer Linux think I'm a Windows apologist. I know both systems very well. I simply refuse to view the world through a veil of hatred.
The article describes Sony's new patent, and then speculates on one possible use for it. Everyone here seems to have their panties in a bunch based on that alone.
Therefore The PS3 will incorporate said technology.
QED
I think a few people here are overdue for a nap.
Got it in one: Macintosh != McIntosh.
They withheld their confidential business plans from someone in a position to take advantage of that knowledge? Won't someone think of the children?
They agree not to take legal action. Something they would otherwise be entitled to.
Really? I find the following to be a perfectly reasonable conversation:
"Hi, I'm having trouble with your website. Windows Defender won't let my browser load it."
"I'm very sorry sir, but I'm unfamiliar with that particular application, and I'm afraid I don't see it on our list of apps for which we guarantee interoperability. I suggest you contact Microsoft support. Maybe they can help you."
stupid question: Why?