They also want to cut the academic exemption, which I think would be a huge mistake. If the effort is to have a strong tech field in America, reducing the number of H1-Bs could well do it, but if we drop a bunch of foreign professors in the process, our training will go down the tubes.
This is not a DeCSS case. This is a jurisdiction case. It is definitely news for nerds and stuff that matters, since internet jurisdiction is a really big deal. I doubt there will be much or any discussion of the DMCA in this case. Probably a good thing too, because you generally want your test case to be completely beyond reproach. Not that I think that Pavlovich did anything wrong, but something more along the lines of Felton's SDMI paper would be more attractive to the court.
I figure I'll live the fast life of a CS grad, working 80 hour weeks for an outrageously high salary, until at 25 I'm declared an old geezer and pink-slipped in favor of some new graduate who's up on the latest development fads. Then I'll go get an education degree, during which I might actually meet women, and then become a teacher, hopefully to be slightly responsible for a generation of kids who can actually make their computers do what they want, instead of having to pay someone else to make their computer do less and less. Oh, and unlike the rest of the teachers, I'll have my college loans paid off.
I know I have memories back at least as far as 22 months. I have no memory of the interior or back yard of the first house my family lived in, but I remember the front yard vividly. The front yard was where I ran around on my own. Apparently I was mostly in the back yard with my Dad on the hammock, and obviously when inside, due to doors and stairs and child gates, I would have been limited to wherever my parents wanted me to be.
Perhaps the fact that my exploration of the front yard was self-directed explains my memory of it?
nVidia clearly hates me. I had problems installing their drivers on my Redhat 8 system a while ago, and was too busy with my schoolwork to put on a different distro, or recompile everything on my system to get it to all work together. But that's okay. I needed to be doing my work anyway, not playing UT 2003.
They decided to release their updated drivers, complete with a Redhat 8 RPM, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EXAMS! To make matters worse, UT 2003 makes my system clock lag quite a bit, and I didn't have ntp set up, so in addition to getting no studying done, I was late to an exam. I'm convinced that they're trying to sabotage my academic career.
...if they go after anyone other than B&N. This is a ludicrous patent, but so was 1-click. I would love to see some of B&N's blood stain the ground this time around. If they take the patent warfare to innocent bystanders, then I will be very unhappy.
We have designated time slots. I'm sure my system would die if the whole university was hitting it at once. The problem isn't that the mainframe can't handle the database I/O. It can handle that just fine. The problem is that they're running a web server with many images per page. It seems to be choking on all those simultaneous http requests. It's not the bandwidth of the images being transferred, but the actual overhead of forking all those threads.
My university is still using an S/390 for course enrollment. This thing is running a web server with lots of images on each page. It has an external ethernet interface, since the machine doesn't have the capability to handle an ethernet card internally. Due to a software problem that effectively magnified the load several times, the system was completely unusable when course registration for next semester began a few weeks ago. Registration got delayed by 2 weeks and a lot of stuff got messed up. Even with the load spike caused by the software problem, I could have hosted the system with no trouble from this box here in my dorm room.
In most operating systems with memory protection, ALL the memory is virtual, from the standpoint of a userland program. It's up to the OS, not the hardware, to decide whether that virtual memory address is going to be mapped onto RAM or disk.
I once wrote a program that had an off-by-one error in it that would resize the relevant vector to be one element larger than it needed to be, and initialize that value to zero. It had another error where I had a of one on the wrong side of a parenthesis in a modulus operation to calculate the address in the vector, so when it should have been looking at index 0, it was looking at index n. Fortunately, all the work on element 0 was done with it stored as a temporary variable, and when it was written back, if all else had gone well, it should have contained a 0 anyway. When I printed out my data, it just put in the 0 at the end of the vector in place of the 0 at the beginning, and the TA figured I must know something special because he didn't understand how it worked.
To hear him tell it, the bill doesn't allow anything that is currently illegal. The bill also obviously doesn't say what it DOES allow. To hear his description of this very vague law, it would seem to be completely unnecessary. Therefore, the fact that it's out there implies that it actually does something. Therefore, he must be lying.
IANAMSW either, but I do know that macroscopic crystals are weaker than their theoretical maximum strengths by a few orders of magnitude because of internal irregularities. When the structure is a very fine crystal of this scale, there really isn't room for such defects. If such a defect were to exist at a given location, there would be nothing there at all, which would be easily detected after the first batch of chips failed testing. I imagine this screen would be extraordinarily durable.
Make them all save to shares on the NT 4 file server. Make this easy by mounting their share as a network drive (not at all hard to do) and backing up the file server regularly. It's definitely worth your while to put a tape drive on that one machine. The alternative is a windows NT logon script that copies the full contents of their My Documents folder to the file server, but if you make it that transparent, they might break it without realizing it, or fill up the file server.
Getting users to make multiple copies has a tendency to confuse them, because they can accidentally do things like accidentally copy an old version over the new version, but most of them seem to be able to handle "save this here". You can even tape it to the bottoms of their monitors. Then you just have one backup to make.
Einstein's letter to Roosevelt describes a nuclear bombs delivered into a harbor on a ship. I was referring to a deliberate act. Of course, nothing would happen if a ship like that had conventional troubles, but a deliberately detonated nuclear device of that size would take out a small state.
Sorry I was unclear on that. My implication was that if you can fill a ship with whatever explosive you want and sail it into a harbor, you could do a hell of a lot of damage with a boat full of heavy water.
It should be noted that many newer nuclear powers have yet to detonate a device of that magnitude. Just imagine what a small cargo ship full of heavy water could do...
Video games are heavily hampered by their interface. Just because the simulation has the skill to beat you when you're using your thumbs doesn't mean it can beat you on a 3-D field.
Anyway, it's easy to make an incredibly good video game team. All you have to do is have the players controlled by an omniscient observer with perfect information. No human could match that. When you make the players autonomous, with imperfect information, a limited field and range of view, and limit their communication with one another to the equivalent data bandwidth of soccer players yelling at each other during play and pointing with their arms (this is implemented in the soccer server) the challenge becomes much greater. Getting independent agents to function as a team when they have different information is not at all trivial.
I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're in the simulation league. We don't have physical robots. The result is we don't have to spend the effort on mechanical concerns and image recognition, and we get to devote more effort to the AI aspect of the competition. In the simulation league, the robots DO get tired, they do miss shots, and they have imperfect information. The idea is to remove all physical considerations from play and have them win on intellect alone. The robots being used in competition are no where near the level required to beat a world cup team, but I imagine that once they get close, these "humanizing" factors will be added to keep the match fair. At the current rate of development, I expect this to be well before 2050.
Actually, in the frame of reference of the disk, which is what is relevant for the purpose of this stress analysis, there is a centrifugal force. Accelerating frames of reference seem to be considered unclean, so our physics professors prefer to tell us that they do not exist, rather than explain how they are useful. There may not be a centrifugal force in physics, but there sure as hell is one in mechanical engineering.
At the subatomic level, everything seems to be perfectly reversible. Elementary particles don't seem to care which direction they are going in time, and there are problems which still vex physicists where things seem to happen backwards. All of this breaks down at the macroscopic level. All of these strange behaviors depend on quantum effects that become irrelevant at the scale of a human body, or even at the scale of large molecules. Electrons may bounce off of holes and walls alike, but humans only bounce off the walls.
I saw a speech given by a Nobel Laureate in which he openly admitted that the brightest minds don't really know where to draw the line between quantum and classical, nor do they now how to justify the guesses they use for where it should be. Until that is solved, transporting a human back in time is way more than just an engineering problem. The only luck researchers have had with acheiving quantum dominating effects at a macroscopic level requires Bose-Einstein condensates, which aren't much good for human transportation.
I wish them good luck with those neutrons though. They might well discover some very useful stuff.
1) Release only mature products. When a bug makes it through, patch it quickly without breaking functionality, and don't charge for the fix.
2) Treat your customers like they have a choice. Even if it's a tough choice, they'll figure out that they have it eventually, and when they get mad enough with your licensing schemes and poor support, they'll make it.
If you can do these things, most customers don't care if the source is open or not. They just want what gets the job done.
I didn't even know they had my phone number. I must have been careless back in the day. Well, they don't anymore, unless they kept a backup. They also no longer have my mailing address. I've generally been happy with the way they've handled things like this, but they seriously screwed up this time. If I hadn't seen this article, I wouldn't have found out until I started getting junk mail from yahoo in my snailmailbox. They didn't give me any notification.
I used to use Yahoo because they were free and I trusted them more than Microsoft (remember the "we own your e-mails" thing?) and I was sure they'd be around a while. Now I've got another free service, though I'm paying ten grand a year to be here so I can use it.
It would be nice if something were free, good, and around forever. It would also be nice if I could fly like in those XP ads, or if chocolate milk would rain from the sky.
I haven't logged in as root on my box since I installed linux, thanks to sudo. My root password is a rather complicated string of characters that bears no resemblance to any words. My user password is similarly strong. Unfortunately, remembering lots of strong passwords isn't exactly easy. So, I've gotten lazy and reused some of them. Based on my tech support experience, I would guess that most people only have one or two passwords that they reuse. Snoop their plaintext logins to thespark.com or something like that, and you've got them. I've never made an unencrypted login to my box, and my passwords are strong, but that doesn't make them secure. Excuse me while I go change them...
I've heard from people who used to work at MS that they have programming contests there from time to time, with anonymous submission, and he has won some of them. Of course, he probably has a bit more flexibility in his schedule than the average guy in the cube row, but he's clearly kept up on his skills.
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They also want to cut the academic exemption, which I think would be a huge mistake. If the effort is to have a strong tech field in America, reducing the number of H1-Bs could well do it, but if we drop a bunch of foreign professors in the process, our training will go down the tubes.
This is not a DeCSS case. This is a jurisdiction case. It is definitely news for nerds and stuff that matters, since internet jurisdiction is a really big deal. I doubt there will be much or any discussion of the DMCA in this case. Probably a good thing too, because you generally want your test case to be completely beyond reproach. Not that I think that Pavlovich did anything wrong, but something more along the lines of Felton's SDMI paper would be more attractive to the court.
I figure I'll live the fast life of a CS grad, working 80 hour weeks for an outrageously high salary, until at 25 I'm declared an old geezer and pink-slipped in favor of some new graduate who's up on the latest development fads. Then I'll go get an education degree, during which I might actually meet women, and then become a teacher, hopefully to be slightly responsible for a generation of kids who can actually make their computers do what they want, instead of having to pay someone else to make their computer do less and less. Oh, and unlike the rest of the teachers, I'll have my college loans paid off.
I know I have memories back at least as far as 22 months. I have no memory of the interior or back yard of the first house my family lived in, but I remember the front yard vividly. The front yard was where I ran around on my own. Apparently I was mostly in the back yard with my Dad on the hammock, and obviously when inside, due to doors and stairs and child gates, I would have been limited to wherever my parents wanted me to be.
Perhaps the fact that my exploration of the front yard was self-directed explains my memory of it?
nVidia clearly hates me. I had problems installing their drivers on my Redhat 8 system a while ago, and was too busy with my schoolwork to put on a different distro, or recompile everything on my system to get it to all work together. But that's okay. I needed to be doing my work anyway, not playing UT 2003.
They decided to release their updated drivers, complete with a Redhat 8 RPM, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EXAMS! To make matters worse, UT 2003 makes my system clock lag quite a bit, and I didn't have ntp set up, so in addition to getting no studying done, I was late to an exam. I'm convinced that they're trying to sabotage my academic career.
...if they go after anyone other than B&N. This is a ludicrous patent, but so was 1-click. I would love to see some of B&N's blood stain the ground this time around. If they take the patent warfare to innocent bystanders, then I will be very unhappy.
We have designated time slots. I'm sure my system would die if the whole university was hitting it at once. The problem isn't that the mainframe can't handle the database I/O. It can handle that just fine. The problem is that they're running a web server with many images per page. It seems to be choking on all those simultaneous http requests. It's not the bandwidth of the images being transferred, but the actual overhead of forking all those threads.
My university is still using an S/390 for course enrollment. This thing is running a web server with lots of images on each page. It has an external ethernet interface, since the machine doesn't have the capability to handle an ethernet card internally. Due to a software problem that effectively magnified the load several times, the system was completely unusable when course registration for next semester began a few weeks ago. Registration got delayed by 2 weeks and a lot of stuff got messed up. Even with the load spike caused by the software problem, I could have hosted the system with no trouble from this box here in my dorm room.
In most operating systems with memory protection, ALL the memory is virtual, from the standpoint of a userland program. It's up to the OS, not the hardware, to decide whether that virtual memory address is going to be mapped onto RAM or disk.
I once wrote a program that had an off-by-one error in it that would resize the relevant vector to be one element larger than it needed to be, and initialize that value to zero. It had another error where I had a of one on the wrong side of a parenthesis in a modulus operation to calculate the address in the vector, so when it should have been looking at index 0, it was looking at index n. Fortunately, all the work on element 0 was done with it stored as a temporary variable, and when it was written back, if all else had gone well, it should have contained a 0 anyway. When I printed out my data, it just put in the 0 at the end of the vector in place of the 0 at the beginning, and the TA figured I must know something special because he didn't understand how it worked.
To hear him tell it, the bill doesn't allow anything that is currently illegal. The bill also obviously doesn't say what it DOES allow. To hear his description of this very vague law, it would seem to be completely unnecessary. Therefore, the fact that it's out there implies that it actually does something. Therefore, he must be lying.
IANAMSW either, but I do know that macroscopic crystals are weaker than their theoretical maximum strengths by a few orders of magnitude because of internal irregularities. When the structure is a very fine crystal of this scale, there really isn't room for such defects. If such a defect were to exist at a given location, there would be nothing there at all, which would be easily detected after the first batch of chips failed testing. I imagine this screen would be extraordinarily durable.
The abacus is in the lounge, just inside from the glass case where half of this stuff is on display.
Make them all save to shares on the NT 4 file server. Make this easy by mounting their share as a network drive (not at all hard to do) and backing up the file server regularly. It's definitely worth your while to put a tape drive on that one machine. The alternative is a windows NT logon script that copies the full contents of their My Documents folder to the file server, but if you make it that transparent, they might break it without realizing it, or fill up the file server.
Getting users to make multiple copies has a tendency to confuse them, because they can accidentally do things like accidentally copy an old version over the new version, but most of them seem to be able to handle "save this here". You can even tape it to the bottoms of their monitors. Then you just have one backup to make.
Einstein's letter to Roosevelt describes a nuclear bombs delivered into a harbor on a ship. I was referring to a deliberate act. Of course, nothing would happen if a ship like that had conventional troubles, but a deliberately detonated nuclear device of that size would take out a small state.
Sorry I was unclear on that. My implication was that if you can fill a ship with whatever explosive you want and sail it into a harbor, you could do a hell of a lot of damage with a boat full of heavy water.
It should be noted that many newer nuclear powers have yet to detonate a device of that magnitude. Just imagine what a small cargo ship full of heavy water could do...
Video games are heavily hampered by their interface. Just because the simulation has the skill to beat you when you're using your thumbs doesn't mean it can beat you on a 3-D field.
Anyway, it's easy to make an incredibly good video game team. All you have to do is have the players controlled by an omniscient observer with perfect information. No human could match that. When you make the players autonomous, with imperfect information, a limited field and range of view, and limit their communication with one another to the equivalent data bandwidth of soccer players yelling at each other during play and pointing with their arms (this is implemented in the soccer server) the challenge becomes much greater. Getting independent agents to function as a team when they have different information is not at all trivial.
I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're in the simulation league. We don't have physical robots. The result is we don't have to spend the effort on mechanical concerns and image recognition, and we get to devote more effort to the AI aspect of the competition. In the simulation league, the robots DO get tired, they do miss shots, and they have imperfect information. The idea is to remove all physical considerations from play and have them win on intellect alone. The robots being used in competition are no where near the level required to beat a world cup team, but I imagine that once they get close, these "humanizing" factors will be added to keep the match fair. At the current rate of development, I expect this to be well before 2050.
Actually, in the frame of reference of the disk, which is what is relevant for the purpose of this stress analysis, there is a centrifugal force. Accelerating frames of reference seem to be considered unclean, so our physics professors prefer to tell us that they do not exist, rather than explain how they are useful. There may not be a centrifugal force in physics, but there sure as hell is one in mechanical engineering.
At the subatomic level, everything seems to be perfectly reversible. Elementary particles don't seem to care which direction they are going in time, and there are problems which still vex physicists where things seem to happen backwards. All of this breaks down at the macroscopic level. All of these strange behaviors depend on quantum effects that become irrelevant at the scale of a human body, or even at the scale of large molecules. Electrons may bounce off of holes and walls alike, but humans only bounce off the walls.
I saw a speech given by a Nobel Laureate in which he openly admitted that the brightest minds don't really know where to draw the line between quantum and classical, nor do they now how to justify the guesses they use for where it should be. Until that is solved, transporting a human back in time is way more than just an engineering problem. The only luck researchers have had with acheiving quantum dominating effects at a macroscopic level requires Bose-Einstein condensates, which aren't much good for human transportation.
I wish them good luck with those neutrons though. They might well discover some very useful stuff.
1) Release only mature products. When a bug makes it through, patch it quickly without breaking functionality, and don't charge for the fix.
2) Treat your customers like they have a choice. Even if it's a tough choice, they'll figure out that they have it eventually, and when they get mad enough with your licensing schemes and poor support, they'll make it.
If you can do these things, most customers don't care if the source is open or not. They just want what gets the job done.
I didn't even know they had my phone number. I must have been careless back in the day. Well, they don't anymore, unless they kept a backup. They also no longer have my mailing address. I've generally been happy with the way they've handled things like this, but they seriously screwed up this time. If I hadn't seen this article, I wouldn't have found out until I started getting junk mail from yahoo in my snailmailbox. They didn't give me any notification.
I used to use Yahoo because they were free and I trusted them more than Microsoft (remember the "we own your e-mails" thing?) and I was sure they'd be around a while. Now I've got another free service, though I'm paying ten grand a year to be here so I can use it.
It would be nice if something were free, good, and around forever. It would also be nice if I could fly like in those XP ads, or if chocolate milk would rain from the sky.
I haven't logged in as root on my box since I installed linux, thanks to sudo. My root password is a rather complicated string of characters that bears no resemblance to any words. My user password is similarly strong. Unfortunately, remembering lots of strong passwords isn't exactly easy. So, I've gotten lazy and reused some of them. Based on my tech support experience, I would guess that most people only have one or two passwords that they reuse. Snoop their plaintext logins to thespark.com or something like that, and you've got them. I've never made an unencrypted login to my box, and my passwords are strong, but that doesn't make them secure. Excuse me while I go change them...
I've heard from people who used to work at MS that they have programming contests there from time to time, with anonymous submission, and he has won some of them. Of course, he probably has a bit more flexibility in his schedule than the average guy in the cube row, but he's clearly kept up on his skills.