Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions.
Please, read the attach for further details.
Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 21263.
Kind regards, The Mikeash.com team http://www.mikeash.com
I particularly love the part about how they put my web site and claim to be from my domain in e-mail to me. Cracks me up.
I don't know if that would help, because for me, Bush's speeches just put me to sleep. Of course, I may not be normal; the only speeches I've ever heard that weren't both simultaneously stupid and boring were by engineers and mathematicians!
Last I checked, human life arose in sub-saharan Africa, which is currently one of the richest ecosystems you'll find anywhere. Human life didn't arise in North Africa or the Middle East. Maybe you meant civilization? Even so, there are plenty of examples of places where civilization arose that didn't turn into deserts.
This doesn't really disqualify Mars from terraforming. Stripping away the atmosphere is something that takes place over millions of years. If we crashed a bunch of comets into the planet and set up mirrors and heated it up, Mars would remain habitable for many times the total time that humanity has existed so far. IIRC, even the Moon can hold a full, breathable atmosphere for something like a million years before it all goes away.
Remember that even full-blown RTGs meant to power huge multibillion-dollar probes to the outer planets are extremely robust. They're designed to not even notice if the rocket that's throwing them into orbit explotes catastrophically, nor the subsequent reentry and hard landing following such an event. A little bouncing around on Mars is peanuts compared to that.
A reactor, on the other hand, sounds like it would be much harder to make accident-proof. I wonder what the plans are for that. But considering all of the fuss over Cassini and friends for just having a little RTG, I'm sure any reactor would have to be extremely safe to even be considered.
I live in Orleans, France. A few months ago, I was wandering around downtown, waiting for a light. I looked for a button to hit, because even if it's a placebo, not all of them are, and you never know. Certain intersections can be really annoying to cross if you don't hit the button. I found this odd black box attached to the pole, and found a button on the bottom. Strange, I thought, that it would be on the bottom. Oh well. I pushed it. "You are on the corner of X St. and Y. St.," the voice said. "Ahead is the...." The thing was giving me directions! It wasn't a crosswalk button, but a button for assistance for the blind. "It is now safe to cross." Gah. And I wasn't even alone on the sidewalk at this point, with this thing blaring away at me and everybody wondering why I needed it.
I applaud you for posting a correction. But still, before you made the original post, did it occur to you that maybe these really smart scientists with Ph.D.'s knew something you didn't? Scientists sometimes get something wrong, but don't you think somebody would have run the numbers before dumping all of this money into research?
There's an XP machine in my house. You're right, it never blue-screens. It just regularly runs out of virtual memory and freezes without any messages at all.
Something the end user would use that has more than 15 controls, hah. I think half of the dialogs in Word qualify.
The thing is, if everybody took the attitude that it's no big deal, and it's not worth the time to go after it, then companies would try to get away with it a lot more. Don't look at it as a way to get your money back, look at it as keeping the company honest. I agree that you need to keep perspective about the issue, but just because a $20 error will take more than $20 of your time to fix isn't necessarily a reason to let it go.
I bet it'll be modded as flamebait, but it's my oppinion anyway, so I'll post it.
As far as I can tell, with a very few exceptions, the entire population of slashdot holds exactly the same opinions you do. Now why would you think that you would get modded down, as flamebait no less, for an opinion held by 90% of the people (and therefore 90% of the mods) on this site? Unless you're trying to get sympathy mods.
If I say, "I prefer sweet life over any kind of death," one should not start asking, "But what kind of life is sweet? Which parts are sweet, and which are non-sweet?" In this version of the sentence, all life is sweet. Likewise, my interpretation of ol' Ben's statement is that all liberty is essential, and people who think otherwise will rapidly discover their error.
Hmm, what's slashdot convention for quoting two levels deep? Well, I'll blockquote:
I hope this doesn't start anything unpleasant
I don't see why it would. Not sure what you are worried about here. (I hope you aren't worried that I will be unpleasant; I try not to be.)
I didn't mean anything personal. It's just that RISC vs. CISC is one of those timeless flamewars like Mac vs. PC or vi vs. emacs. I have no reason to doubt your civility, but sometimes these things get out of hand. But so far, so good!
Modern CPUs from AMD and Intel do this kind of translation, but they're the only ones that do it as far as I know.
How many companies make x86 chips anyway? They are the big two. And Transmeta does their own weird thing. The only other chip I can think of is the Via C3 family, which as I understand it is sort of a 486 on steroids... in other words, it doesn't do the decoding to micro-ops thing.
Meanwhile, on the PowerPC side, they do the micro-ops thing too (but they call them "iops").
I think I saw an x86-compatible chip from National Semiconductor, but I forget the details. It's not that relevant, though, since these advanced techniques are only really required if you're going for high speed, and the NatSemi chip wasn't. Low-speed x86 clones don't do weird tricks, but high-speed RISC chips don't generally do such weird tricks either. The pointer to the G5's "iops" is interesting, but the page does say that most PPC instructions translate to a single iop. IIRC a figure of 95% of PPC instructions being implemented directly in hardware, with the other 5% using microcode, but my memory is notoriously faulty and it was before the G5s anyway. Given that most instructions have a 1-1 correspondence with a single micro-op, I would hesitate to call it a translation system. I would be surprised if there were more than a small handful of x86 instructions that didn't require several micro-ops to implement.
If this translation layer isn't holding them back, why does Intel need such an enormous R&D budget to produce chips that, while fast, are not so great when it comes to performance/power?
I said the pain of a wacky instruction set is isolated to the translation layer, and the wacky instruction set doesn't hold back the rest of the chip. I never said there is no pain in a wacky instruction set, or that designing the fastest CPU chips in the world is easy.
Well, I think the overhead of a translation layer may be more significant than you say. But I will freely admit to guessing.
In any case, the point of a translation layer is to change a wacky, arcane instruction set into something reasonable, so in theory the core should be free to run faster. But it's possible that without a really sophisticated (Transmeta-like) translation layer, the strangeness of the original instruction set filters through to the underlying layers.
As for performance/power, Intel made a deliberate decision to make the fastest clock speeds they could, and that's what they did. AMD focused on performance per clock cycle and wound up with better performance/power (not surprising). I would guess that Intel figured they can keep their power dissipation from getting too insane with die shrinks.
The thing is, Intel may have the fastest chips, but they aren't fastest by much. If their R&D spending were indicative, they should have chips that are ten times faster than IBM's, instead of being close enough in performance to make it highly questionable who wins the contest at all.
As for why Intel spends so much to design their chips, don't ask me. They would probably be spending a lot even if they were making PowerPC-family chips instead of Pentium 4 chips.
You may very well be right. I always assumed that it was because of their insis
I hope this doesn't start anything unpleasant.... Anyway:
Modern CPU chips translate instructions into RISC-like micro-ops, and feed the micro-ops into multiple execution units. AMD chips can do a whole bunch of stuff in a single clock cycle, which is why they are much faster per clock cycle than an Intel chip. The pain of a wacky instruction set is isolated in the translation part of the chip, and doesn't significantly hold back the chip in other ways.
Modern CPUs from AMD and Intel do this kind of translation, but they're the only ones that do it as far as I know. Everybody else implements most of the instruction set directly in hardware, reserving micro-ops for rare, complicated instructions that aren't speed-critical. If this translation layer isn't holding them back, why does Intel need such an enormous R&D budget to produce chips that, while fast, are not so great when it comes to performance/power?
RISC fans predicted years ago that CISC would die, because RISC is so much better. But CISC chips contain RISC cores these days, and meanwhile architectures that were originally "RISC" have all kinds of special instructions for working with video data and such (doesn't seem so "reduced" to me). What really happened is that RISC and CISC kind of met in the middle.
"Reduced" doesn't refer to the number of instructions, but rather their complexity. In effect, the instructions on a RISC chip should do one thing and do it fast. Vector instructions like Altivec don't really violate that even though they operate on multiple pieces of data at once, because they still only do one thing, and they do it extremely quickly.
And the old idea that RISC instructions would win because they are easier to decode didn't pan out. CISC instructions get decoded to RISC-like micro-ops, as I said, and it turns out not to be a huge deal. Meanwhile, those CISC instructions are denser than RISC instructions, so you fit more of them into your limited cache space, which helps speed.
I really doubt this. Everybody who is even close to AMD and Intel in speed uses RISC, and they accomplish it with far less R&D budget. I'm convinced that the reason the PowerPC and POWER can even pretend to be competitive with Intel, even though Intel vastly outspends IBM and Motorola, is because the enormous complexity of a modern CISC core ends up sucking tons of design money to keep going. If CISC works just as well as RISC in practice, why is there only one surviving high-speed CISC architecture, where there are several high-speed RISC architectures?
It appears it's even more bizarre than that. I just tried this out. If I move the files using 'mv' in the shell, it does exactly as you say. If I move the files using the Finder, the alias continues to point at the original file, even though it has a different name. This is all on 10.3.
Annoyingly, Mac OS aliases and Mac OS symlinks are not the same!
A symlink points to a specific path. If you move the file at the symlink's target, and replace it with a second file, the symlink now points to the second file, even on Mac OS X.
An alias points to a specific file. If you move an alias's target and put another file there, the alias still points to the old file. (With a bit of hacking, you can create an alias that works just like a symlink, but you have to write code to do it.)
The "ln -s" command creates symlinks, not aliases. As far as I know, there is no way to create aliases from the command line (other than using osascript and asking the Finder to do it for you). Even more delightful, aliases don't work for everybody. More than once, I have run into a situation where replacing a file with an alias to that file will break the program, because it reads the alias instead of following it. Using a symlink works fine.
Mac OS X also supports hard links. Except it doesn't. HFS+ doesn't support what you need for true hardlinks, so OS X fakes it with some hidden directories and something that looks like a hard link to the user but a symlink to the kernel. Or something like that.
IMO it is neither respectful nor even logical. First, why should their job title need to mention their nationality? I'm not naive enough to suggest that we should be beyond such matters, but it would be nice. After all, a programmer or a teacher or a lawyer doesn't get a prefix on his title to indicate what country he's from, nor should he.
About the logic part, cosmo is Russian so cosmonauts are from Russia, Taiko is Chinese so taikonauts are from China, and astro is Greek, so astronauts are from... whoops.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst part is that, despite my horror at the stupidity of your users, I have no trouble at all believing the story.
I got this one today:
Dear user of Mikeash.com,
Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content)
outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by
a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe,
follow the instructions.
Please, read the attach for further details.
Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 21263.
Kind regards,
The Mikeash.com team http://www.mikeash.com
I particularly love the part about how they put my web site and claim to be from my domain in e-mail to me. Cracks me up.
Oh my god, top posting has come to slashdot. Shoot me now. Or better yet, shoot the top-posters.
A factor of 10 is very close to a factor of 7.8. "Order of magnitude" is a very imprecise thing.
God knows how the computer game industry managed to survive until the era of ubiquitous home internet access!
I don't know if that would help, because for me, Bush's speeches just put me to sleep. Of course, I may not be normal; the only speeches I've ever heard that weren't both simultaneously stupid and boring were by engineers and mathematicians!
Last I checked, human life arose in sub-saharan Africa, which is currently one of the richest ecosystems you'll find anywhere. Human life didn't arise in North Africa or the Middle East. Maybe you meant civilization? Even so, there are plenty of examples of places where civilization arose that didn't turn into deserts.
This doesn't really disqualify Mars from terraforming. Stripping away the atmosphere is something that takes place over millions of years. If we crashed a bunch of comets into the planet and set up mirrors and heated it up, Mars would remain habitable for many times the total time that humanity has existed so far. IIRC, even the Moon can hold a full, breathable atmosphere for something like a million years before it all goes away.
Remember that even full-blown RTGs meant to power huge multibillion-dollar probes to the outer planets are extremely robust. They're designed to not even notice if the rocket that's throwing them into orbit explotes catastrophically, nor the subsequent reentry and hard landing following such an event. A little bouncing around on Mars is peanuts compared to that.
A reactor, on the other hand, sounds like it would be much harder to make accident-proof. I wonder what the plans are for that. But considering all of the fuss over Cassini and friends for just having a little RTG, I'm sure any reactor would have to be extremely safe to even be considered.
Pointless.
Anybody who reads your post will know enough not to trust a company that pulls something like this. The boycott will happen on its own.
I live in Orleans, France. A few months ago, I was wandering around downtown, waiting for a light. I looked for a button to hit, because even if it's a placebo, not all of them are, and you never know. Certain intersections can be really annoying to cross if you don't hit the button. I found this odd black box attached to the pole, and found a button on the bottom. Strange, I thought, that it would be on the bottom. Oh well. I pushed it. "You are on the corner of X St. and Y. St.," the voice said. "Ahead is the...." The thing was giving me directions! It wasn't a crosswalk button, but a button for assistance for the blind. "It is now safe to cross." Gah. And I wasn't even alone on the sidewalk at this point, with this thing blaring away at me and everybody wondering why I needed it.
You didn't mention The Ocean. It doesn't have a lot of political pull, but the regulatory and economic environment is very peaceful.
I applaud you for posting a correction. But still, before you made the original post, did it occur to you that maybe these really smart scientists with Ph.D.'s knew something you didn't? Scientists sometimes get something wrong, but don't you think somebody would have run the numbers before dumping all of this money into research?
There's an XP machine in my house. You're right, it never blue-screens. It just regularly runs out of virtual memory and freezes without any messages at all.
Something the end user would use that has more than 15 controls, hah. I think half of the dialogs in Word qualify.
The thing is, if everybody took the attitude that it's no big deal, and it's not worth the time to go after it, then companies would try to get away with it a lot more. Don't look at it as a way to get your money back, look at it as keeping the company honest. I agree that you need to keep perspective about the issue, but just because a $20 error will take more than $20 of your time to fix isn't necessarily a reason to let it go.
Yes, because comparing DRM to the prevention of teenage sex is such a great way to rally people to the cause....
I bet it'll be modded as flamebait, but it's my oppinion anyway, so I'll post it.
As far as I can tell, with a very few exceptions, the entire population of slashdot holds exactly the same opinions you do. Now why would you think that you would get modded down, as flamebait no less, for an opinion held by 90% of the people (and therefore 90% of the mods) on this site? Unless you're trying to get sympathy mods.
If I say, "I prefer sweet life over any kind of death," one should not start asking, "But what kind of life is sweet? Which parts are sweet, and which are non-sweet?" In this version of the sentence, all life is sweet. Likewise, my interpretation of ol' Ben's statement is that all liberty is essential, and people who think otherwise will rapidly discover their error.
I didn't mean anything personal. It's just that RISC vs. CISC is one of those timeless flamewars like Mac vs. PC or vi vs. emacs. I have no reason to doubt your civility, but sometimes these things get out of hand. But so far, so good!
I think I saw an x86-compatible chip from National Semiconductor, but I forget the details. It's not that relevant, though, since these advanced techniques are only really required if you're going for high speed, and the NatSemi chip wasn't. Low-speed x86 clones don't do weird tricks, but high-speed RISC chips don't generally do such weird tricks either. The pointer to the G5's "iops" is interesting, but the page does say that most PPC instructions translate to a single iop. IIRC a figure of 95% of PPC instructions being implemented directly in hardware, with the other 5% using microcode, but my memory is notoriously faulty and it was before the G5s anyway. Given that most instructions have a 1-1 correspondence with a single micro-op, I would hesitate to call it a translation system. I would be surprised if there were more than a small handful of x86 instructions that didn't require several micro-ops to implement.
I said the pain of a wacky instruction set is isolated to the translation layer, and the wacky instruction set doesn't hold back the rest of the chip. I never said there is no pain in a wacky instruction set, or that designing the fastest CPU chips in the world is easy.
Well, I think the overhead of a translation layer may be more significant than you say. But I will freely admit to guessing.
In any case, the point of a translation layer is to change a wacky, arcane instruction set into something reasonable, so in theory the core should be free to run faster. But it's possible that without a really sophisticated (Transmeta-like) translation layer, the strangeness of the original instruction set filters through to the underlying layers.
The thing is, Intel may have the fastest chips, but they aren't fastest by much. If their R&D spending were indicative, they should have chips that are ten times faster than IBM's, instead of being close enough in performance to make it highly questionable who wins the contest at all.
You may very well be right. I always assumed that it was because of their insis
I hope this doesn't start anything unpleasant.... Anyway:
Modern CPU chips translate instructions into RISC-like micro-ops, and feed the micro-ops into multiple execution units. AMD chips can do a whole bunch of stuff in a single clock cycle, which is why they are much faster per clock cycle than an Intel chip. The pain of a wacky instruction set is isolated in the translation part of the chip, and doesn't significantly hold back the chip in other ways.
Modern CPUs from AMD and Intel do this kind of translation, but they're the only ones that do it as far as I know. Everybody else implements most of the instruction set directly in hardware, reserving micro-ops for rare, complicated instructions that aren't speed-critical. If this translation layer isn't holding them back, why does Intel need such an enormous R&D budget to produce chips that, while fast, are not so great when it comes to performance/power?
RISC fans predicted years ago that CISC would die, because RISC is so much better. But CISC chips contain RISC cores these days, and meanwhile architectures that were originally "RISC" have all kinds of special instructions for working with video data and such (doesn't seem so "reduced" to me). What really happened is that RISC and CISC kind of met in the middle.
"Reduced" doesn't refer to the number of instructions, but rather their complexity. In effect, the instructions on a RISC chip should do one thing and do it fast. Vector instructions like Altivec don't really violate that even though they operate on multiple pieces of data at once, because they still only do one thing, and they do it extremely quickly.
And the old idea that RISC instructions would win because they are easier to decode didn't pan out. CISC instructions get decoded to RISC-like micro-ops, as I said, and it turns out not to be a huge deal. Meanwhile, those CISC instructions are denser than RISC instructions, so you fit more of them into your limited cache space, which helps speed.
I really doubt this. Everybody who is even close to AMD and Intel in speed uses RISC, and they accomplish it with far less R&D budget. I'm convinced that the reason the PowerPC and POWER can even pretend to be competitive with Intel, even though Intel vastly outspends IBM and Motorola, is because the enormous complexity of a modern CISC core ends up sucking tons of design money to keep going. If CISC works just as well as RISC in practice, why is there only one surviving high-speed CISC architecture, where there are several high-speed RISC architectures?
It appears it's even more bizarre than that. I just tried this out. If I move the files using 'mv' in the shell, it does exactly as you say. If I move the files using the Finder, the alias continues to point at the original file, even though it has a different name. This is all on 10.3.
Annoyingly, Mac OS aliases and Mac OS symlinks are not the same!
A symlink points to a specific path. If you move the file at the symlink's target, and replace it with a second file, the symlink now points to the second file, even on Mac OS X.
An alias points to a specific file. If you move an alias's target and put another file there, the alias still points to the old file. (With a bit of hacking, you can create an alias that works just like a symlink, but you have to write code to do it.)
The "ln -s" command creates symlinks, not aliases. As far as I know, there is no way to create aliases from the command line (other than using osascript and asking the Finder to do it for you). Even more delightful, aliases don't work for everybody. More than once, I have run into a situation where replacing a file with an alias to that file will break the program, because it reads the alias instead of following it. Using a symlink works fine.
Mac OS X also supports hard links. Except it doesn't. HFS+ doesn't support what you need for true hardlinks, so OS X fakes it with some hidden directories and something that looks like a hard link to the user but a symlink to the kernel. Or something like that.
I am Jewish, you moron.
Israel has not put anybody into space.
The US has put an Israeli into space. Not the same thing.
"The rest of the world"? Come on.
43 years behind Russia? Sure.
43 years behind the USA? Sure.
But nobody else has put anybody into space. Aside from Russia and the USA, China is ahead of the rest of the world. Whee!
IMO it is neither respectful nor even logical. First, why should their job title need to mention their nationality? I'm not naive enough to suggest that we should be beyond such matters, but it would be nice. After all, a programmer or a teacher or a lawyer doesn't get a prefix on his title to indicate what country he's from, nor should he.
About the logic part, cosmo is Russian so cosmonauts are from Russia, Taiko is Chinese so taikonauts are from China, and astro is Greek, so astronauts are from... whoops.
But oh well, it's not going to change.