What right do you have to rebuke anyone for demonizing their political opponents? You accuse a bunch of pacifists and cautious moderates of supporting violence. No matter how much you may disagree with them, if you think about it for a minute, you must recognize this is ludicrous. If you're not willing to think from the other side's perspective, you don't belong in the debate.
Noam Chomsky, who is certainly not one of Bush's biggest fans, defended him on national television against accusations that Bush may have had some specific knowledge of the September 11 attacks, and failed to act on it, which is actually among the more popular conspiracy theories going.
I'm not asking you to defend International Answer. They and the half million people who show up at their DC demonstrations do a decent job of that themselves. I'm sure you probably hate Noam Chomsky, so I'm just going to ask you to please not be far worse than him.
What the hell does "Support the Troops" mean anyway? The only time I hear it getting used is when politicians use it to try to silence their critics. Ever seen the bumper sticker that says "Support The Troops, Bring Them Home"? I've got a friend who got to hang out with her brother briefly between his Afghanistan deployment and his Iraq deployment, and I know she's scared to death of getting that phone call. She's not a pacifist, so you'd better hope you never accuse her in person of not supporting the troops because she wants her brother home. She'll rip your head off.
I've been to a couple of those marches where one out of every 500 people in the US converges on DC to make their wishes heard. Sure, there are always a few nutcases in the crowd, but there's also hundreds of thousands of people who are there because they want less dying, not more. They're there because they don't think that warfare which has now led to the death of 20,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians and hundreds of our own troops is the best response to what happened to us on our own soil. You can disagree with them and debate them on this, and maybe you'll educate and enlighten each other, but when you stop listening and accuse them all of being like the couple of nutcases that you'll find in any crowd that's 1/500 of a very large nation, you're nothing but a hypocrite.
People complain about freedom of speech being supressed. This is because it is being supressed. No, it's not to the point of a fascist state, and Bush is not Hitler. People are complaining now because they'd rather deal with it before it gets worse. Most of the censorship to date has been economic, not legal, but for those of us who aren't completely sure where our meals are coming from next month (and there are a lot of us) that can be just as dangerous.
Let's start the debate off right. What *does* "Support Our Troops" actually mean?
This is a really great question to know the answer to. Unfortunately, it's usually not in your best interest as a potential hire to be completely honest in answering it. If I'm hiring, I won't ask this question unless I want to see how comfortable someone is lying or giving a canned answer, both of which seem to be important skills in some IT shops.
The author points out the apparent inefficiencies in Brooks's surgical development model, but he seems to miss the logic behind it. Brooks notes that there's at least an order of magnitude difference between an employable programmer and a really good programmer. His well-informed suggestion for the ad-hoc development methods of the time was that an organization with 200 programmers, managed by the 20 best, should fire the other 180 and put the 20 back to work. Of course, if those 20 programmers have the other 180 backing them up, doing things like building tools, testing, researching language constructs and data structures and the like which will improve certain critical bottlenecks, they, the "surgeons", can keep focused on actually writing the bulk of the code that makes it into the finished product.
Certainly many of the criticisms were well-supported, but I think the author missed the background on this one.
As someone who is currently applying for (and mostly getting rejected from) IT jobs that "prefer" certain certifications (of which I have none), I might be a bit jaded, but this is my take on things:
I'm in good standing with my current employer and could probably even get a fairly significant promotion soon, if I wanted to. Unfortunately, external circumstances require me to relocate a couple hundred miles to where this will be impossible. From what I've seen of A+ certification, there's quite little on the test that I couldn't find with 15 minutes, appropriate manuals, and Google. I have the experience to know when to check the manuals and Google, so the only penalty is taking the time to do so, which I suspect many people with A+ certification revert to a month after the test anyway. So, if I were to go get the certification before applying to more jobs, that would simply be more time that I'm unemployed and out of touch with the work.
I think I'd learn a fair amount from an MCSE course, but the last place I actually got an interview, which said it "preferred" MCSE and actually meant it, clearly has little use for that kind of expertise, and made it clear that they were really interested in my experience in a nearly identical environment. Apparently the MCSE preference was an artifact of HR, even though it's not going to be a very significant part of the actual hiring decision. HR at this (and many other) organizations seems to be acting as a gatekeeper, with qualifications for certain job titles coming down from on high, rather than the departments that actually want the employees.
I've actually helped people study for CCNA, and while I think it's worthwhile stuff to know, it really seems to be overkill for many of the jobs that want it. It's got a reputation as being the 800 pound gorilla of certifications, so asking for it for jobs that are not 800 pound gorilla jobs will result in attracting people who are overqualified, who will leave for better pay when the economy picks up, or people who are overtrained and underexperienced, who will be really slow to pick anything up.
Given the screwy economy at the moment, some shops seem to be hiring a few of these overqualified people to manage overtrained, underexperienced minions, in the hopes that the minions will be experienced minions when their superiors leave for greener pastures. In organizations that already have a base of stable employees, this seems to supplement their workforce nicely, but in new organizations the result is disastrous, since the overqualified managers have been out of the trenches for too long and the overtrained techs haven't been in them for long enough.
Hopefully, this situation will stabilize when the economy does. In the meantime, I'm having to look for work in cities other than the one in which I will be living, since I have to go 25 miles away to find a place where the HR department is even referring my application to the department that wants me, and I have so few connections there to get a lead by word of mouth, which would be effortless where I currently live.
Hubble got an upgrade a few years ago from a 60's mainframe chip to a 486. I'm not sure how that affects its capabilities, but the stunning photographs that first made it famous predate the upgrade.
I just played Hordes of the Underdark. I wanted to puke in the cutscene where the Valsharess tries to seduce the character. They have no problem making realistic drawings of her with depth and shadow, even making her come out looking pretty hot, but the game engine does not pull this off at all. Granted, Neverwinter Nights doesn't have the most sophisticated engine out there, but it's a fairly recent game which can on occasion stress fairly recent hardware, so the top of the line can't be a whole lot better.
And the elbows! I guess they didn't quite figure out how to model skin and the underlying flesh compressing and folding. If you look really carefully, you might also notice a complete lack of any kind of folding at her armpits as well, but you can't seem much of that, since one is mostly hidden and the other's in shade.
Unfortunately, the explosion of blood and bones when I do quivering palm in Neverwinter Nights looks more like I implanted a land mine in the chest of the target than that I stopped their heart.
Sorry, I thought you were referring to the original ring zero from Multics. Unlike modern systems which are split (with hardware support) into user and supervisor modes, Multics had 8 rings, which allowed all kinds of happy jailing. If modern OSes had this kind of control, you'd be able to do something like having your web server run in a privileged mode that lets it read public_html directories as root but write only as its own user, which is nice when you're philosophically opposed to running your web server as root (and you should be) but you want to deny directory listings to local filesystem users without locking out the web server. This is quite useful when on a very large server where some users don't really trust other users (they shouldn't have to) and would like to be able to enforce.htaccess permissions, but you have to hack a modern OS to pieces to make something like that go. Yes, it's possible to do this with ACLs, but those are OS level, and letting applications enforce capabilities (as Apache does with.htaccess files) is a nice thing to be able to do. My point is, doing this on a modern OS isn't pretty, and experience tells me that pretty is a necessary condition for security.
I have to wonder if the Multics reference was a contrast between Windows and one of the most sophisticated OS security models ever implemented, or a comparison between Windows and an OS whose security process essentially consisted of declaring it to be secure, waiting a week or so for someone to crack it, patching, and repeating.
If you look at their design, it's pretty clear that there's a single fluid circuit for both processors. Obviously the fluid can only flow in one direction, so one processor is going to be substantially hotter than the other. I hope they over-engineered it a bit.
When my laptop died a couple years ago, I couldn't afford a new computer. I managed to put together a K6-2 500 with 96 MB of RAM, a 1.6 GB hard drive, and 2 635 MB hard drives. I actually had a legal copy of Windows XP sitting dormant on the shelf, since MS used to give them out like cheese samples to CS undergrads, but no machine to put it on. I couldn't even put my perfectly legal non-oem store bought copy of Win98 on there and do anything useful with so little disk space spread across 3 drives.
I went over to my friend's place, popped in the debian network install disk, and set up a barebones system, with/usr on one of the small drives,/var on the other, and everything else on the 1.6 GB one. Not much room for mp3s, but I had no sound card, so it wasn't an issue. It turned out that my crappy video card couldn't drive the monitor at 1024x768, so my friend gave me a slightly less crappy one he had laying around for the price of a Big Lebowski DVD (the entire tangible cost of the venture) and that got it up to 1024x768, which was as high as I felt like going with a 15" monitor anyway.
This computer, which had about the resources for a minimal installation of Windows 98 first edition, did everything but media (remember, no sound card), and was blazing fast doing almost all of it at the same time. The only exception was OpenOffice, which took a minute to load, but was again blazing fast once loaded. It went from power off to completion of KDE loading in 20 seconds.
I started tinkering with it a bit, setting up a few services for myself and such, learning the shell, and found that I really liked the system design philosophy. After 3 months of use I had more control over my Linux box than I'd had over Windows, which I'd been using since its debut and in various predecessors back to DOS 3.3.
After working the next summer, I could afford a respectable machine, and I gave that copy of Windows XP a shot. It was better by degrees, and it had some concept of a security model, but it was still the same old thing. The internals were hidden away from me. Sometimes they'd break, and a google search would turn up a flamewar arguing over whether or not deleting a cryptic hex string from the registry would fix the problem or make it worse.
The Linux install on the new box was not without flaws, but I was able to fix the problems based on past experience. Unlike Windows, Linux made sense. I'd learn how to use one utility, and other things would just work the same way. I realized I really had it down when in the same day I guessed the command line switches to change the behavior of a utility I'd never used before, and guessed the name and path to a configuration file I'd never seen before without even looking at directory listings.
Linux was certainly not easier to use out of the box the first time I installed it (though knoppix was beautiful when I tried that later), but it actually let me learn how my computer worked, and as such I recommend that any CS student, whether or not they can afford a top-of-the-line Windows machine, should try their hand at using some sort of open system as their primary computer for several months. It might be annoying to adjust, and you might not stick with it, but you'll end up with a much better understanding of how real software actually works.
Ummm... I wish my tennis racket was made of nanotubes. I could sell it and never work again. Take the article with a huge grain of salt, because they've confused nanotubes with graphite fiber.
If someone could just create an enable/disable button for cookies, javascript, and plugins, and put it on a toolbar that I don't have to make a half dozen clicks to get to, bother-free browsing would be so much easier.
While not strictly necessary, cookies make detecting popup-blocking software a lot easier. I never get these DHTML overlay ads, because I have cookies enabled only for a precious few sites. I still get the annoying gigantic flash animations in the middle of the screen, and it would be nice to be able to kill those with a single click.
As a KDE user, I have the joy of using Klipper. I imagine other window managers might also have clipboard managers as well. Give it a shot. I find it quite useful.
Sun's Linux strategy is quite simple if you really look at it. They view the OS as an extension of the hardware. It is the platform on which their proprietary software runs. Linux just makes their package cheaper.
It sounds like your administrator is highly skilled. That's great. I'm sure there are plenty of highly skilled, very well-paid admins who take care of large NT deployments, and don't have security problems. The historical problem with NT servers is that security and stability have been secondary priorities to features. Microsoft has basically admitted this and now swears that they've changed their priorities in light of it. The problem is that they've been rushing to market for so long now that even dropping everything for a month to do security reviews isn't putting a noticeable dent in the problem.
As a Windows power user, but rather inexperience with servers, I was able to set up a top-quality hardware NT server running only a few services to be fast and stable, but I still missed a glaring security hole that was (to my knowledge) never breached only because of a firewall and appropriate care taken administering the other machines behind it. Patch management was still a nightmare.
As a Linux novice, server experience mostly from the aforementioned NT server, I was able to set up a fast, stable Linux server running several services on hardware that was literally assembled from what was laying around, most of it from old bargain desktops. I had a friend of mine quite a lot more expert than myself check out the setup, and he confirmed that it was in fact as secure as my patch level, which was very easy to manage.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination an open source fanatic. I generally prefer the best tool for the job, and in that capacity Windows has failed me time after time after time, with occasional modest successes. With Linux, I've never spent significant effort on the same problem twice, because the design philosophy of the OS and the typical applications is sufficiently open that I can understand why and how what I'm changing is solving the problem, rather than rebooting and praying. I've learned much more about Linux and other unix OSes in the past couple of years than I have in a decade of working with Windows, making Linux a progressively better tool for the job as it sits running on the server.
My anecdotal experience is not by itself statistically significant, but I hear it far more frequently than I hear the reverse. It blows a gigantic hole in the Windows TCO claims. Sure Windows is getting better, but that blows a gigantic hole in their claim that Linux is less mature.
Of course, TCO is a business term. This is a techie forum, so there's a visceral distrust here of anything that breaks without explanation, as NT is more apt to do. Even if Linux broke just as often as NT and just as badly, we'd like Linux better, because we learn a lot more about the problem. We even get to go fix it ourselves too, which is why bug parity between Windows and Linux wouldn't last very long.
So that, intrepid NT using poster, is why a lot of people here bitch about Windows.
Unsurprisingly, 90% of/. either hasn't read the patent, or made up their minds before they did anyway and weren't paying attention. This is not the "breathing, in the general vicinitiy of a computer" sort of patent. It's extremely precise. I'll dumb it down for you and just tell you that they basically patented using Phase-Locked Looping to allow a processor to run at a higher clock frequency than the motherboard knows how to deal with, when the GCD of the processor frequency and the motherboard bus frequency is 4 MHz. After reading so many vague and broad patents, this one is a real breath of fresh air.
So, when would you get a situation with a 4 MHz GCD? Well, it would probably happen when installing a pre-MMX Pentium, 486, 386, or 286. If you further examine the patent, you notice the mention of cache on the convertor board, so we can probably rule out the 286 and the 386.
It is of course entirely possible that Intel still uses something like this to allow fine-grained control of clock speed, but given their general aversion to helping out overclockers, I doubt it. If Intel did infringe, which wouldn't surprise me, they can probably show that $500 million is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the total revenue they received on infringing products sold at market-driven prices, since most people got their pre-MMX Pentiums with new motherboards, rather than use convertor boards. Furthermore, given how much time has elapsed since then, Intel may have a valid claim that All Computers failed to enforce their patent in a timely manner, and thus failed to mitigate the damages, giving them protection under both patent law and general civil law.
If I had to guess, I'd say Intel heard from All Computers's attorneys, did some back of the envelope calculations, offered them $10 million to go away, and All Computers didn't go for it. Sadly, with the existing highly adversarial method for introducing technical evidence that the jury is explicitly picked to not be qualified to evaluate, winning heavily inflated patent claims is quite feasible.
Indeed. The problem we run into is when spammers try to circumvent our filters, and then have the gall to claim first amendment protection. It's like poking every inch of a mile long fence to find a hole big enough to slip through, and then claiming it wasn't trespassing because you didn't climb over. This is exactly why "trespass to chattels" is a commonly-used and often successful claim in spam litigation.
From everything I've read, I'd say Linus is anything but casual about freedom. What he is *not* is an idealist. That's what we have RMS for. He's a pragmatist, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of an engineering project. Perhaps not the person you want at the head of a movement, but that's not what he is. He's first and foremost an engineer.
If you want to "secure our freedoms in the technology space" with F/OSS, you need to actually have F/OSS that works well to convince the 99.99% of the world to whom the need and benefit is not intuitively obvious. If all we had were a bunch of RMS clones, we'd be a lot worse off, because he scares the hell out of business types, who are much more concerned with the economic benefits of F/OSS that Linus Torvalds provides.
We need leaders with a variety of different strengths to spread the message to people with a variety of different interests. Linus Torvalds does an excellent job selling the benefits of F/OSS to engineers. The fact that he lets people like Eben Moglen handle the freedom side doesn't mean that he's causing any harm. If Eben Moglen spent his precious time hacking kernel code, we'd all be worse off.
Remember that until Kepler figured out elliptical orbits, the epicycle theory fit the data better than the Copernican theory. Of course, the epicycle theory simply said what is without any attempt to explain why. Modern cosmologists figure out what is, announce it and mention that they don't know why, and talk with the physicists to try to figure it out. From the perspective of pattern-recognition, the epicycle theory was quite good, so the similarities to that in this case need not be taken as negative signs. Since modern cosmologists are actively working to find an explanation for the pattern, the negative connotation of epicycles, the lack of science, simply doesn't apply.
This is only true using a full-keyspace brute force attack. The NSA was at least 20 years ahead of the academic world in discovering linear cryptanalysis. This is why they asked IBM to change the sboxes in DES, but wouldn't say why. The result was that DES was using an sbox from a fairly small subset of possible sboxes that resist linear cryptanalysis, but we didn't know it for another couple decades. Imagine for a minute that the NSA had a technique that cut the effective key size by a factor of 4. You can brute force attack that. There might even be polynomial algorithms for it, taking advantage of mathematical properties that only the largest employer of mathematicians in the world knows about.
We can't even be certain that the NSA doesn't have quantum computers, although this is less likely. When your attacker has a non-deterministic computer, you're fairly screwed on finding an algorithm that can be efficiently encoded and decoded on deterministic machines while taking extraordinarily long to decrypt without the key. The only saving grace here is that a quantum computer may not be a general non-deterministic machine, so there may be some things that a non-deterministic machine can do that a quantum computer cannot. To my knowledge, the equivalence between quantum computers and non-deterministic machines has not been proven either positively or negatively. I'm sure the NSA knows though.
RTFP, I didn't compare being a student to being a lawyer. I just pointed out that my parents don't have the money to completely cover my education, despite being highly respected attorneys who can ask higher fees than most. In reality, your lawyer won't pass any significant savings on to you, because there won't be any significant savings. The legal system changes VERY slowly, since every change must be carefully scrutinized to minimize the risk of side effects that run counter to the interests of justice.
As for the worth of a professional, an introductory microeconomics course will teach you that paying someone an extra $1000 to bring you an extra $1001 is a benefit to you. I highly recommend taking one if you're still in school, regardless of your field of study. I found that it gave me an advantage when I took AI.
When my ex-boss called me in to fix his internet connection, he paid me $40 for 5 minutes of work, before I even brought up fees. I was in the neighborhood anyway, so there wasn't really even travel time to add into that fee. My ex-boss didn't stop for a second to consider whether or not my tech support time was worth $480/hour. He just knew that going without his connection until the ISP techs could get there was going to cost him more than $40 in business, so paying me $480/hour to do something that was really easy for me was completely worth it to him. Paying me 50 times the wage I make as a student helpdesk consultant at school was in everyone's best interest, because it got done a job that needed to be done.
Clearly the job in this case needed to be done, otherwise we wouldn't have antitrust laws. These guys got the job done. They're actually asking for *less* than the conventional 33% contingency fee. The fact that this amounts to about an order of magnitude more than their per-hour billing rate is irrelevant, unless you just want to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
What right do you have to rebuke anyone for demonizing their political opponents? You accuse a bunch of pacifists and cautious moderates of supporting violence. No matter how much you may disagree with them, if you think about it for a minute, you must recognize this is ludicrous. If you're not willing to think from the other side's perspective, you don't belong in the debate.
Noam Chomsky, who is certainly not one of Bush's biggest fans, defended him on national television against accusations that Bush may have had some specific knowledge of the September 11 attacks, and failed to act on it, which is actually among the more popular conspiracy theories going.
I'm not asking you to defend International Answer. They and the half million people who show up at their DC demonstrations do a decent job of that themselves. I'm sure you probably hate Noam Chomsky, so I'm just going to ask you to please not be far worse than him.
What the hell does "Support the Troops" mean anyway? The only time I hear it getting used is when politicians use it to try to silence their critics. Ever seen the bumper sticker that says "Support The Troops, Bring Them Home"? I've got a friend who got to hang out with her brother briefly between his Afghanistan deployment and his Iraq deployment, and I know she's scared to death of getting that phone call. She's not a pacifist, so you'd better hope you never accuse her in person of not supporting the troops because she wants her brother home. She'll rip your head off.
I've been to a couple of those marches where one out of every 500 people in the US converges on DC to make their wishes heard. Sure, there are always a few nutcases in the crowd, but there's also hundreds of thousands of people who are there because they want less dying, not more. They're there because they don't think that warfare which has now led to the death of 20,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians and hundreds of our own troops is the best response to what happened to us on our own soil. You can disagree with them and debate them on this, and maybe you'll educate and enlighten each other, but when you stop listening and accuse them all of being like the couple of nutcases that you'll find in any crowd that's 1/500 of a very large nation, you're nothing but a hypocrite.
People complain about freedom of speech being supressed. This is because it is being supressed. No, it's not to the point of a fascist state, and Bush is not Hitler. People are complaining now because they'd rather deal with it before it gets worse. Most of the censorship to date has been economic, not legal, but for those of us who aren't completely sure where our meals are coming from next month (and there are a lot of us) that can be just as dangerous.
Let's start the debate off right. What *does* "Support Our Troops" actually mean?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
This is a really great question to know the answer to. Unfortunately, it's usually not in your best interest as a potential hire to be completely honest in answering it. If I'm hiring, I won't ask this question unless I want to see how comfortable someone is lying or giving a canned answer, both of which seem to be important skills in some IT shops.
The author points out the apparent inefficiencies in Brooks's surgical development model, but he seems to miss the logic behind it. Brooks notes that there's at least an order of magnitude difference between an employable programmer and a really good programmer. His well-informed suggestion for the ad-hoc development methods of the time was that an organization with 200 programmers, managed by the 20 best, should fire the other 180 and put the 20 back to work. Of course, if those 20 programmers have the other 180 backing them up, doing things like building tools, testing, researching language constructs and data structures and the like which will improve certain critical bottlenecks, they, the "surgeons", can keep focused on actually writing the bulk of the code that makes it into the finished product.
Certainly many of the criticisms were well-supported, but I think the author missed the background on this one.
As someone who is currently applying for (and mostly getting rejected from) IT jobs that "prefer" certain certifications (of which I have none), I might be a bit jaded, but this is my take on things:
I'm in good standing with my current employer and could probably even get a fairly significant promotion soon, if I wanted to. Unfortunately, external circumstances require me to relocate a couple hundred miles to where this will be impossible. From what I've seen of A+ certification, there's quite little on the test that I couldn't find with 15 minutes, appropriate manuals, and Google. I have the experience to know when to check the manuals and Google, so the only penalty is taking the time to do so, which I suspect many people with A+ certification revert to a month after the test anyway. So, if I were to go get the certification before applying to more jobs, that would simply be more time that I'm unemployed and out of touch with the work.
I think I'd learn a fair amount from an MCSE course, but the last place I actually got an interview, which said it "preferred" MCSE and actually meant it, clearly has little use for that kind of expertise, and made it clear that they were really interested in my experience in a nearly identical environment. Apparently the MCSE preference was an artifact of HR, even though it's not going to be a very significant part of the actual hiring decision. HR at this (and many other) organizations seems to be acting as a gatekeeper, with qualifications for certain job titles coming down from on high, rather than the departments that actually want the employees.
I've actually helped people study for CCNA, and while I think it's worthwhile stuff to know, it really seems to be overkill for many of the jobs that want it. It's got a reputation as being the 800 pound gorilla of certifications, so asking for it for jobs that are not 800 pound gorilla jobs will result in attracting people who are overqualified, who will leave for better pay when the economy picks up, or people who are overtrained and underexperienced, who will be really slow to pick anything up.
Given the screwy economy at the moment, some shops seem to be hiring a few of these overqualified people to manage overtrained, underexperienced minions, in the hopes that the minions will be experienced minions when their superiors leave for greener pastures. In organizations that already have a base of stable employees, this seems to supplement their workforce nicely, but in new organizations the result is disastrous, since the overqualified managers have been out of the trenches for too long and the overtrained techs haven't been in them for long enough.
Hopefully, this situation will stabilize when the economy does. In the meantime, I'm having to look for work in cities other than the one in which I will be living, since I have to go 25 miles away to find a place where the HR department is even referring my application to the department that wants me, and I have so few connections there to get a lead by word of mouth, which would be effortless where I currently live.
I hate commuting.
Hubble got an upgrade a few years ago from a 60's mainframe chip to a 486. I'm not sure how that affects its capabilities, but the stunning photographs that first made it famous predate the upgrade.
I just played Hordes of the Underdark. I wanted to puke in the cutscene where the Valsharess tries to seduce the character. They have no problem making realistic drawings of her with depth and shadow, even making her come out looking pretty hot, but the game engine does not pull this off at all. Granted, Neverwinter Nights doesn't have the most sophisticated engine out there, but it's a fairly recent game which can on occasion stress fairly recent hardware, so the top of the line can't be a whole lot better.
And the elbows! I guess they didn't quite figure out how to model skin and the underlying flesh compressing and folding. If you look really carefully, you might also notice a complete lack of any kind of folding at her armpits as well, but you can't seem much of that, since one is mostly hidden and the other's in shade.
Unfortunately, the explosion of blood and bones when I do quivering palm in Neverwinter Nights looks more like I implanted a land mine in the chest of the target than that I stopped their heart.
Sorry, I thought you were referring to the original ring zero from Multics. Unlike modern systems which are split (with hardware support) into user and supervisor modes, Multics had 8 rings, which allowed all kinds of happy jailing. If modern OSes had this kind of control, you'd be able to do something like having your web server run in a privileged mode that lets it read public_html directories as root but write only as its own user, which is nice when you're philosophically opposed to running your web server as root (and you should be) but you want to deny directory listings to local filesystem users without locking out the web server. This is quite useful when on a very large server where some users don't really trust other users (they shouldn't have to) and would like to be able to enforce .htaccess permissions, but you have to hack a modern OS to pieces to make something like that go. Yes, it's possible to do this with ACLs, but those are OS level, and letting applications enforce capabilities (as Apache does with .htaccess files) is a nice thing to be able to do. My point is, doing this on a modern OS isn't pretty, and experience tells me that pretty is a necessary condition for security.
I have to wonder if the Multics reference was a contrast between Windows and one of the most sophisticated OS security models ever implemented, or a comparison between Windows and an OS whose security process essentially consisted of declaring it to be secure, waiting a week or so for someone to crack it, patching, and repeating.
If you look at their design, it's pretty clear that there's a single fluid circuit for both processors. Obviously the fluid can only flow in one direction, so one processor is going to be substantially hotter than the other. I hope they over-engineered it a bit.
When my laptop died a couple years ago, I couldn't afford a new computer. I managed to put together a K6-2 500 with 96 MB of RAM, a 1.6 GB hard drive, and 2 635 MB hard drives. I actually had a legal copy of Windows XP sitting dormant on the shelf, since MS used to give them out like cheese samples to CS undergrads, but no machine to put it on. I couldn't even put my perfectly legal non-oem store bought copy of Win98 on there and do anything useful with so little disk space spread across 3 drives.
/usr on one of the small drives, /var on the other, and everything else on the 1.6 GB one. Not much room for mp3s, but I had no sound card, so it wasn't an issue. It turned out that my crappy video card couldn't drive the monitor at 1024x768, so my friend gave me a slightly less crappy one he had laying around for the price of a Big Lebowski DVD (the entire tangible cost of the venture) and that got it up to 1024x768, which was as high as I felt like going with a 15" monitor anyway.
I went over to my friend's place, popped in the debian network install disk, and set up a barebones system, with
This computer, which had about the resources for a minimal installation of Windows 98 first edition, did everything but media (remember, no sound card), and was blazing fast doing almost all of it at the same time. The only exception was OpenOffice, which took a minute to load, but was again blazing fast once loaded. It went from power off to completion of KDE loading in 20 seconds.
I started tinkering with it a bit, setting up a few services for myself and such, learning the shell, and found that I really liked the system design philosophy. After 3 months of use I had more control over my Linux box than I'd had over Windows, which I'd been using since its debut and in various predecessors back to DOS 3.3.
After working the next summer, I could afford a respectable machine, and I gave that copy of Windows XP a shot. It was better by degrees, and it had some concept of a security model, but it was still the same old thing. The internals were hidden away from me. Sometimes they'd break, and a google search would turn up a flamewar arguing over whether or not deleting a cryptic hex string from the registry would fix the problem or make it worse.
The Linux install on the new box was not without flaws, but I was able to fix the problems based on past experience. Unlike Windows, Linux made sense. I'd learn how to use one utility, and other things would just work the same way. I realized I really had it down when in the same day I guessed the command line switches to change the behavior of a utility I'd never used before, and guessed the name and path to a configuration file I'd never seen before without even looking at directory listings.
Linux was certainly not easier to use out of the box the first time I installed it (though knoppix was beautiful when I tried that later), but it actually let me learn how my computer worked, and as such I recommend that any CS student, whether or not they can afford a top-of-the-line Windows machine, should try their hand at using some sort of open system as their primary computer for several months. It might be annoying to adjust, and you might not stick with it, but you'll end up with a much better understanding of how real software actually works.
Ummm... I wish my tennis racket was made of nanotubes. I could sell it and never work again. Take the article with a huge grain of salt, because they've confused nanotubes with graphite fiber.
Yay! I'm not sure why I didn't find that when I went looking. Thanks.
If someone could just create an enable/disable button for cookies, javascript, and plugins, and put it on a toolbar that I don't have to make a half dozen clicks to get to, bother-free browsing would be so much easier.
While not strictly necessary, cookies make detecting popup-blocking software a lot easier. I never get these DHTML overlay ads, because I have cookies enabled only for a precious few sites. I still get the annoying gigantic flash animations in the middle of the screen, and it would be nice to be able to kill those with a single click.
As a KDE user, I have the joy of using Klipper. I imagine other window managers might also have clipboard managers as well. Give it a shot. I find it quite useful.
Sun's Linux strategy is quite simple if you really look at it. They view the OS as an extension of the hardware. It is the platform on which their proprietary software runs. Linux just makes their package cheaper.
Hehe, I know the feeling. Behold, the power of stupid people in large groups! I guess it's time to metamod...
It sounds like your administrator is highly skilled. That's great. I'm sure there are plenty of highly skilled, very well-paid admins who take care of large NT deployments, and don't have security problems. The historical problem with NT servers is that security and stability have been secondary priorities to features. Microsoft has basically admitted this and now swears that they've changed their priorities in light of it. The problem is that they've been rushing to market for so long now that even dropping everything for a month to do security reviews isn't putting a noticeable dent in the problem.
As a Windows power user, but rather inexperience with servers, I was able to set up a top-quality hardware NT server running only a few services to be fast and stable, but I still missed a glaring security hole that was (to my knowledge) never breached only because of a firewall and appropriate care taken administering the other machines behind it. Patch management was still a nightmare.
As a Linux novice, server experience mostly from the aforementioned NT server, I was able to set up a fast, stable Linux server running several services on hardware that was literally assembled from what was laying around, most of it from old bargain desktops. I had a friend of mine quite a lot more expert than myself check out the setup, and he confirmed that it was in fact as secure as my patch level, which was very easy to manage.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination an open source fanatic. I generally prefer the best tool for the job, and in that capacity Windows has failed me time after time after time, with occasional modest successes. With Linux, I've never spent significant effort on the same problem twice, because the design philosophy of the OS and the typical applications is sufficiently open that I can understand why and how what I'm changing is solving the problem, rather than rebooting and praying. I've learned much more about Linux and other unix OSes in the past couple of years than I have in a decade of working with Windows, making Linux a progressively better tool for the job as it sits running on the server.
My anecdotal experience is not by itself statistically significant, but I hear it far more frequently than I hear the reverse. It blows a gigantic hole in the Windows TCO claims. Sure Windows is getting better, but that blows a gigantic hole in their claim that Linux is less mature.
Of course, TCO is a business term. This is a techie forum, so there's a visceral distrust here of anything that breaks without explanation, as NT is more apt to do. Even if Linux broke just as often as NT and just as badly, we'd like Linux better, because we learn a lot more about the problem. We even get to go fix it ourselves too, which is why bug parity between Windows and Linux wouldn't last very long.
So that, intrepid NT using poster, is why a lot of people here bitch about Windows.
Unsurprisingly, 90% of /. either hasn't read the patent, or made up their minds before they did anyway and weren't paying attention. This is not the "breathing, in the general vicinitiy of a computer" sort of patent. It's extremely precise. I'll dumb it down for you and just tell you that they basically patented using Phase-Locked Looping to allow a processor to run at a higher clock frequency than the motherboard knows how to deal with, when the GCD of the processor frequency and the motherboard bus frequency is 4 MHz. After reading so many vague and broad patents, this one is a real breath of fresh air.
So, when would you get a situation with a 4 MHz GCD? Well, it would probably happen when installing a pre-MMX Pentium, 486, 386, or 286. If you further examine the patent, you notice the mention of cache on the convertor board, so we can probably rule out the 286 and the 386.
It is of course entirely possible that Intel still uses something like this to allow fine-grained control of clock speed, but given their general aversion to helping out overclockers, I doubt it. If Intel did infringe, which wouldn't surprise me, they can probably show that $500 million is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the total revenue they received on infringing products sold at market-driven prices, since most people got their pre-MMX Pentiums with new motherboards, rather than use convertor boards. Furthermore, given how much time has elapsed since then, Intel may have a valid claim that All Computers failed to enforce their patent in a timely manner, and thus failed to mitigate the damages, giving them protection under both patent law and general civil law.
If I had to guess, I'd say Intel heard from All Computers's attorneys, did some back of the envelope calculations, offered them $10 million to go away, and All Computers didn't go for it. Sadly, with the existing highly adversarial method for introducing technical evidence that the jury is explicitly picked to not be qualified to evaluate, winning heavily inflated patent claims is quite feasible.
Indeed. The problem we run into is when spammers try to circumvent our filters, and then have the gall to claim first amendment protection. It's like poking every inch of a mile long fence to find a hole big enough to slip through, and then claiming it wasn't trespassing because you didn't climb over. This is exactly why "trespass to chattels" is a commonly-used and often successful claim in spam litigation.
From everything I've read, I'd say Linus is anything but casual about freedom. What he is *not* is an idealist. That's what we have RMS for. He's a pragmatist, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of an engineering project. Perhaps not the person you want at the head of a movement, but that's not what he is. He's first and foremost an engineer.
If you want to "secure our freedoms in the technology space" with F/OSS, you need to actually have F/OSS that works well to convince the 99.99% of the world to whom the need and benefit is not intuitively obvious. If all we had were a bunch of RMS clones, we'd be a lot worse off, because he scares the hell out of business types, who are much more concerned with the economic benefits of F/OSS that Linus Torvalds provides.
We need leaders with a variety of different strengths to spread the message to people with a variety of different interests. Linus Torvalds does an excellent job selling the benefits of F/OSS to engineers. The fact that he lets people like Eben Moglen handle the freedom side doesn't mean that he's causing any harm. If Eben Moglen spent his precious time hacking kernel code, we'd all be worse off.
Remember that until Kepler figured out elliptical orbits, the epicycle theory fit the data better than the Copernican theory. Of course, the epicycle theory simply said what is without any attempt to explain why. Modern cosmologists figure out what is, announce it and mention that they don't know why, and talk with the physicists to try to figure it out. From the perspective of pattern-recognition, the epicycle theory was quite good, so the similarities to that in this case need not be taken as negative signs. Since modern cosmologists are actively working to find an explanation for the pattern, the negative connotation of epicycles, the lack of science, simply doesn't apply.
This is only true using a full-keyspace brute force attack. The NSA was at least 20 years ahead of the academic world in discovering linear cryptanalysis. This is why they asked IBM to change the sboxes in DES, but wouldn't say why. The result was that DES was using an sbox from a fairly small subset of possible sboxes that resist linear cryptanalysis, but we didn't know it for another couple decades. Imagine for a minute that the NSA had a technique that cut the effective key size by a factor of 4. You can brute force attack that. There might even be polynomial algorithms for it, taking advantage of mathematical properties that only the largest employer of mathematicians in the world knows about.
We can't even be certain that the NSA doesn't have quantum computers, although this is less likely. When your attacker has a non-deterministic computer, you're fairly screwed on finding an algorithm that can be efficiently encoded and decoded on deterministic machines while taking extraordinarily long to decrypt without the key. The only saving grace here is that a quantum computer may not be a general non-deterministic machine, so there may be some things that a non-deterministic machine can do that a quantum computer cannot. To my knowledge, the equivalence between quantum computers and non-deterministic machines has not been proven either positively or negatively. I'm sure the NSA knows though.
RTFP, I didn't compare being a student to being a lawyer. I just pointed out that my parents don't have the money to completely cover my education, despite being highly respected attorneys who can ask higher fees than most. In reality, your lawyer won't pass any significant savings on to you, because there won't be any significant savings. The legal system changes VERY slowly, since every change must be carefully scrutinized to minimize the risk of side effects that run counter to the interests of justice.
As for the worth of a professional, an introductory microeconomics course will teach you that paying someone an extra $1000 to bring you an extra $1001 is a benefit to you. I highly recommend taking one if you're still in school, regardless of your field of study. I found that it gave me an advantage when I took AI.
When my ex-boss called me in to fix his internet connection, he paid me $40 for 5 minutes of work, before I even brought up fees. I was in the neighborhood anyway, so there wasn't really even travel time to add into that fee. My ex-boss didn't stop for a second to consider whether or not my tech support time was worth $480/hour. He just knew that going without his connection until the ISP techs could get there was going to cost him more than $40 in business, so paying me $480/hour to do something that was really easy for me was completely worth it to him. Paying me 50 times the wage I make as a student helpdesk consultant at school was in everyone's best interest, because it got done a job that needed to be done.
Clearly the job in this case needed to be done, otherwise we wouldn't have antitrust laws. These guys got the job done. They're actually asking for *less* than the conventional 33% contingency fee. The fact that this amounts to about an order of magnitude more than their per-hour billing rate is irrelevant, unless you just want to complain.