Obviously, someone shouldn't be allowed to fly the flag of Nazi Germany outside their house,[...]
Just a precision, The US is the only country I've seen where people display their flag outside their house. Elsewhere it's at most sometimes done during the national day.
It's also common here in Australia, mostly it's first generation immigrants however there's a good sprinkling of rednecks who fly the flag as well although with the latter there is also a similar phenomenon to those in the southern states that fly the confederate flag many of them will fly the Eureka Flag.
Really? ABC-Disney is the largest? I thought for sure the largest conglomerate was NBC-Universal which owns at least 10 channels in the U.S., an Europe-wide channel, and also various broadcast stations in Australia and Japan. That would make FOX-Murdoch a distant fourth, after the ABC, CBS, NBC oligarchs.
Back to article-
I'm surprised the BBC gives-away free news on the web. They block their radio and television programs from being seen by anyone who has not paid a TV/radio license (UK citizens), so I would expect them to do the same for text. (shrug)
Minor correction: NBC-Universal owns a number of cable channels in Australia, the only relationship with any of the local FTA (broadcast) stations is the occasional sharing of news items.
When I was at University I enrolled in an Astronomy course. One weekend I arranged with one of the professors to borrow one of the departments telescopes and took a few friends from the class to the area my family lived in (about 100km outside of the city).
It turned out to be not very pleasant weather, but we waited a couple of hours and by about 1am the weather started to clear: I pointed out the Milky Way to the others who were with me and it then took me a further 1/2 hour to convince them that the stuff I was pointing to was indeed stars and not just a bunch of cloud: none of my class mates had really spent much time outside of the city.
I found this both amusing and disturbing at the same time.
...damned if you don't, seems three cups is never enough for some of us:
Coffee Lowers Gout Risk
Coffee-Swilling Men Get Less Gout, Study Shows
By Daniel J. DeNoon WebMD Health News
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
May 25, 2007 - The more coffee men drink, the lower their risk of gout. At least four cups a day lower gout risk by 40%, a Canada/U.S. study shows.
Gout starts with a buildup of uric acid in the blood. This results in deposits of uric acid crystals in the joints and surrounding areas, causing swelling and intense pain.
The new study is based on data from nearly 46,000 male medical professionals enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Over 12 years, 757 of these men developed gout, report Hyon K. Choi, MD, DrPH, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and colleagues.
Because the men filled out detailed diet questionnaires, Choi's team was able to track the men's self-reported use of coffee and tea.
They found that the more coffee the men drank, the less likely they were to have gout.
Drinking one to three cups of coffee a day lowered gout risk by only 8%. But drinking four or five cups a day dropped gout risk by 40%. And true coffee addicts -- those who drank six cups a day or more -- had nearly a 60% lower risk of gout.
Caffeine, whether from coffee, tea, or both, was not related to gout risk. Tea, it turned out, did not decrease gout risk.
But decaffeinated coffee did have an effect, although it wasn't as large as the effect of the high-test brew. Men who drank one to three cups of decaf had a 33% lower risk of gout. Those who drank four cups of decaf a day -- or more -- had only a 27% lower gout risk.
It's not clear why coffee lowers gout risk. Choi and colleagues note that coffee is a major source of a strong antioxidant, phenol chlorogenic acid, that may affect gout risk.
"Our findings are most directly generalizable to men age 40 years and older (the most gout-prevalent population) with no history of gout," Choi and colleagues suggest.
It's not yet known whether women who drink coffee are at lower risk of gout.
The findings appear in the June 2007 issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.
Ok, now I know this probably is hard to find and not free, but I play and would like to recommend Red Faction. It has many, many, many user made maps (my favorite are the Micro-faction maps - whereby you are the size of a mouse in this giant room) great gameplay, and server setting called "pure-faction" that has an anti cheat mode built into the server side.
Go to L4Y.com to join forums and download maps for free. You can start your own server and check out the maps ( some of the best are by designers Lots-o-Pot and RedFrog.)
Many of the gamers there are ages 25-55+ Even several women players...
Cya there - my player name is Bird...
I'll second that... many people often complain that the graphics aren't so hot, but it has the most addictive gameplay and a pretty solid core group of players.
It's just a shame that THQ/Volition won't open source the damn thing as they did for Freespace2 and as others have done in the case of the Descent series and quake series.
The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.
People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.
How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.
The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.
The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.
I worked within the same space about 10 years ago - I was a sysadmin for a group of asic design jockies as well as the firmware and device driver guys and I'm gonna call you on this...
The hardware designers were under the same sorts of pressures, if not more so, than the software guys and I saw many bugs that would end up in the shipping silicon. The general attitude was always "oh! a bug: well the software guys will just have to work around it."
And as for "no patching", well that's also BS, you can patch silicon, it's just rather messy having to have the factory do it post-fab by cutting traces on die.
Not necessarily the case with Australian Postgraduate Awards. When I accepted an APA scholarship I did not lose my IP rights and have a copy filed away of an explicit Uni policy of the time that states IP is mine. Note: mine was not an "Industry" APA, meaning my scolarship was funded by the AU government, not a company. Your uni might be different (I signed up with Newcastle Uni in 2004.)
Fair cop! I applied at Macquarie, but told them to stick it... partially for the IP policy.
In one long sentence (probably better constructed as four): recieve, handfull, universities' (it's singular in this context), defacto (it's two words).
If you want to be an english school-marm, at least have the balls to sign in!
In Australian Universities (at least the one I work for anyway), students retain all IP rights to any research they conduct. As staff though, we get no rights for anything we come up with. Well, it used to be that way until one professor who developed a new way to treat liver cancer challenged the University he worked for. The judege ruled in his favour stating that there is no contractual 'duty to invent'. Here's the story if anyone is interested...
Whilst this is technically correct it also misleading; yes it is true that in Australia students own the IP to anything they produce whilst doing a research degree, however, if you read the fine print on the application/enrolment form you will find that there is a clause which gives those rights back to the institution, you must sign this section to recieve any tuition fee scholarship (in Australia most graduate research students have their tuition paid by the Government but the assignment of these funds is handled by the universities' administrative unit) thus in actuality unless you are the handfull of students who are willing to stump up the $20K or so per annum yourself (or more likely your employer) then the university has defacto ownership of your IP.
William Robinson writes with news that the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument developed by NASA and sent aboard India's Chandrayaan-1, has confirmed the presence of iron-bearing minerals on the moon. This marks the beginning of an extensive examination of the composition of the lunar surface.
"Isro officials said M3 would help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals to ultimately understand the moon's early geological evolution. 'The compositional map that will come out of M3 will have fantastic data on geological formation of the moon,' the official said. Researchers said the relative abundance of magnesium and iron in lunar rocks could help confirm whether the moon was covered by a molten, magma ocean early on in its history. Iron and magnesium will also indicate melting of the moon, if it happened and how it formed later. This metallic element has been found in lunar meteorites, but scientists know little about its distribution in the lunar crust."
I'm far more interested to hear how Mr. Robinson and his family made it back from Alpha Centauri and did Dr. Smith and the Robot make the return journey with them?
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
Yes, I was half-joking, but as many other respondants have opined not only are _many_ of the practices of sales and marketing types morally questionable (to put it lightly) but frankly there is often a gaping chasm between being clever or smart and demonstrating intelligent, insight or wisdom, and most of the behaviour that is practiced by people in these as well as many other professions (professional management practices, politicians and stockbrokers come to mind) demonstrates a strong bias in aptitude for cleverness over intelligence or wisdom.
..bad form to respond to my own post I know but:
To get an insight into how thoroughly insidious marketing and sales techniques really are, you aught to do a little research into the origins of their tool of choice: advertising. Advertising itself is amoral (note I didn't say immoral), it serves the simple and required function of announcing the availability of your goods and/or services to the market. However, _modern_ (TV and film) advertising techniques have their origins in one, film, a work which is both devastatingly brilliant and breathtakingly abhorrent at the same time.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
Yes, I was half-joking, but as many other respondants have opined not only are _many_ of the practices of sales and marketing types morally questionable (to put it lightly) but frankly there is often a gaping chasm between being clever or smart and demonstrating intelligent, insight or wisdom, and most of the behaviour that is practiced by people in these as well as many other professions (professional management practices, politicians and stockbrokers come to mind) demonstrates a strong bias in aptitude for cleverness over intelligence or wisdom.
...that peer reviewed journals (at least in computer science) are crap. 1) peer review is an old boys network, 2) people don't look at substance, they look for fancy buzzwords of the month and equations that look hard (you're rewarded for the more convoluted your paper is!), and 3) the way the system is setup, 99% of what is published is crap...people at universities and labs are forced to produce as many publications as possible to get promoted. It would be unfair of me to say that all of it is useless, but it's definitely inefficient. Look at where the great ideas in computer science and software development come today...they come from the community through things like open source (e.g. Linux, BitTorrent, etc). The academic community just rides on their coattails...
I agree with the first part of your post, but at the risk of re-igniting the discussion that we've had here previously; it's quite a strech to say that the academic community simply rides the coattails of the opensource community. Yes, BitTorrent is something that would have cut it as Computer Science research but whilst Linux may be fun, useful, more secure than Windoze, and Free (as in speech) it has very little to do with computer _science_ research.
Indeed there is a yawning chasm between what academia and industry do, often this is regrettable*, however it is often so because industry and the academy have very different goals, not withstanding the idiocay that is trying to turn universities into _purely_ commercial enterprises, without blue-skies research we might as well all just go back to swinging from a tree in the jungle.
*on the part of both groups - just witness the way industry is approaching the prospect of many-cores as a pervasive platform, aided and abetted by some of the less clear thinking of those in the academy - Software Transaction Memory anyone?
The Australian government seems to have gone pretty crazy over this thing, and is taking one of the classic paths when meeting resistance; that is to make the plan even bolder and more sweeping. There seems no recognition of the fact that this won't do a damned thing to prevent the production and distribution of child pornography, but will cause no end of problems for legitimate users. But this government clearly feels it's back is against the wall, and rather than simply taking the more sensible path and admitting that filtering is flawed, and in its own way dangerous, and that any attempt to screw with various P2P and secure protocols is going to real harm to legitimate users, is basically saying "We know better than the ISPs and technical experts."
Politics tends to attract the insanely vain, but these guys are way out to lunch. I have no idea who their technical advisers are, but either these guys are morons or simply being paid to tell the government what it wants to here.
But as anyone who has dealt with any kind of Internet security can tell you, it's always a game of catch-up. Whether it's viruses, root kits, DRM, firewalls, and so on, there's always someone willing, for good or ill, to crack systems, and believe me, if they actually go through with this nonsense, the desire to crack the filters, and more dangerous and delerious attempts to bust encryption and P2P is simply going to be met with better innovations to overcome them.
But it does go to show you that the intellectual tyrannies are not simply the product of political tyrannies, but any government so sure in its own righteousness can play the part of the tyrant, simply by repeating the mantra "it's for their own good".
The Enlightenment has died in Australia, and it's sad that the people aren't marching on Adelaide demanding the government's resignation and Rudd's forced expulsion. Western Civilization has lost its balls. We've fought world wars, sacrificed our young on countless battlefields, beat back the Communists by even the most questionable means, for what? So some religious nut can make decrees as to what law-abiding citizens of a so-called free country can view on the Internet?
What a sad, fearful, pathetic lot the West has become.
Huh? I know Nick Xenophon has been exercising a little of his balance-of-power lately but last time I looked Kev'07 was from Queensland and the parliment was located in Canberra, WTF has Adelaide got to do with it?
This is such a bad idea. I think any company who buys these will be shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, in the 90s companies generally hated putting http:/// in advertising. Then they dropped the www part and just made it company.com. Now they are having their ultimate dream. To drop the.com part too. But with that comes a major problem. How are average people going to distinguish what is a internet address from something else?
Imagine this, Ford says in its advertising: "Go to ford.com". Its obvious here what to do. Now imagine they get just the TLD 'ford'. So what do you say. "Go to ford"? What the hell does that mean. Now they'll start having to say things like "Type ford into your web browser's address bar" Yeah, that's a whole lot easier to say than ford.com. Idiots.
I hope this totally backfires on all the marketing and sales people in the world so that they learn their lesson.
I don't know what planet your from, but on planet earth being intrinsically unable to learn lessons is a prerequisite for entry in sales or marketing.
This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)
What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Thanks for your comment and the links. Every time I run across an article like this and sigh, wishing I had the technical cojones to explain why it is that we were doing things like this on mainframes in the 80s with complete safety... and continuing to wonder why Intel couldn't just COPY the damned concepts if they can't figure out how to implement them from scratch.
I suspect that that is precisely what intel have done... badly
Our world continues to be saddled with a half assed operating system running on a third rate architecture and for no other reason that technology takes a back seat (or maybe it's more like back of the bus) to marketing, bribery and collusion (with an unhealthy dose of buyer ignorance thrown in for good measure).
I continue to hope that good technology will win out eventually, although I'm almost convinced at this point that it will have to come from some country that hasn't been bought out by the Borg.
I think you hope in vain, markets bring competition but they also tend to ubiquity and uniformity, this is their downside, however centrally planned economies (or hybrid one's, as I assume the "some country" you mention is probably China) tend to end up in a pretty similar place due to bureaucratic inertia, and political corruption. In any case it is the general public's unwillingness to be more than slightly discerning in the way it consumes that ultimately drives things, it is the appeal to authority that is the problem, and the authority is not the geeky guy in the lab coat it's the marketing type in the $10K armani suit.
I wonder though, and maybe you know, why isn't the Power-PC mentioned in the Wikepedia article. I would assume because of its origin that it is closer to the 370 than to the Intel architecture in being fully virtualizable, a concept apparently not on the "roadmap" that Steve Jobs kept referring to in his rationale for Apple's switch to Intel. The Power-PC represented our best hope of escaping the Intel monoculture and I'd like nothing better than to once again have a mainstream non-Intel (and non-Intel-like) choice when I pick my next laptop.
As I have mentionedpreviously there is still another architecture that has the potential to knock x86 off it's pedestal, ARM outsells x86 by around 7 to 1, it is still a long shot of course but not impossible (although I wouldn't wager money on it)
Of course if Intel had a deserved (I'm being generous) third of the market then what Google is doing with this initiative would be dead in the water (as it probably should be).
Actually I'm not completely upset about what google are doing here... if we are to end up with a monoculture of x86 only it actually makes a lot of sense to take what we've learnt from x86 virtualisation and use it in novel ways, it certainly aught to be more energy efficient than java or flash.
On the security side, I'll just quote Google's description: "modules may not contain certain instruction sequences". That doesn't sound like a robust way to detect malicious code.
Why not? It just means that the permissible instruction sequences are limited to a subset that can be statically analyzed and verified to be safe. The Java VM has similar verification algorithms that are run whenever untrusted code is first loaded.
It's true that this does not allow all x86 code to run; it's at least practically (and probably theoretically) impossible to correctly determine whether or not a piece of code is safe, but as long as the VM errs on the side of caution, there shouldn't be any problems with this approach.
I will grant that this makes it unclear what the advantage is over (say) Java applets. What can this technology do that the Java VM couldn't? As far as I'm concerned, the failure of Java in the browser has more to do with the lack of a standard library for high-performance multimedia applications (think: Flash) than with shortcomings in the bytecode language.
All this means is that google have created a VM in which the "bytecodes" happen to be executable on real hardware, but some of these "bytecodes" have to be intercepted and replaced at runtime with substitute code... this aught to sound familiar; this is what a software hypervisor does (eg VMware).
In other words every man and his dog has jumped aboard the "I can write an x86-hypervisor" bandwagon, the difference being that google have decided to take theirs and embed it into the browser rather than run as a standalone app.
Interestingly enough it took the momentum that VMware created to get intel to correct some of the issues with its' ISA to make it much easier to virtualise, perhaps someone the size of google can prod intel into adding a third wave of virtualisation accelartion extensions to their ISA so as to make this idea safer* with low overhead
No one cares about devices that a small percentage of population use. Plus, a large amounts of them are truck drivers, and depending on where you live, those people are heavily audited/supervised and their jobs are on the line at the slightest mistake (well, depending on how annoying their union are).
The issue with cellphones is that its almost impossible to look out on the street and NOT see someone driving with a cellphone to his/her ear, and I live in a region where thats illegal! Imagine where its not!
Like with most all other problematic bad habits, its never an issue until a significant chunk of people do it.
You are probably right, but my curiosity would still love to know if the less natural form of communication that CB emphasises (short bursts terminating with the keyword - "over") makes a significant difference to the impact on ones driving skills.
There have been so many studies into the effects of mobile phone use, but does anyone know of a study that shows that cell phone usage is any worse than using another comms devices such as a CB or UHF unit whilst driving?
Actually, I think it's really more the context that matters, which you kind of point out with the phrase "literal truth", versus I suppose "philosophical truth"(?).
My murderer above claimed innocence, but he lied so this was not truth. Literal truth.
Kindness is preferable to cruelty. Philosophical Truth?
Anyway, I'm just having fun with words and concepts, and that's the truth:)
Yes it's all about context, but when the context is not exactly crystal clear there is what you might call a default contextual meaning which I am arguing has changed.
Now of course languages evolve (unless they're dead like Latin), but over the last 100 years English hasn't so much evolved but has undergone a kind of derranged intelligent design where the driving force hasn't been the evolving demands of the english speaking world but instead it has been the at whim of the coke-snorting advertising execs and the squalid opportunists in PR-firms who have managed (without the conscious effort a conspiracy-theory would require) to turn Orwell's idea of Newspeak into a reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, someone shouldn't be allowed to fly the flag of Nazi Germany outside their house,[...]
Just a precision, The US is the only country I've seen where people display their flag outside their house. Elsewhere it's at most sometimes done during the national day.
It's also common here in Australia, mostly it's first generation immigrants however there's a good sprinkling of rednecks who fly the flag as well although with the latter there is also a similar phenomenon to those in the southern states that fly the confederate flag many of them will fly the Eureka Flag.
Hey, I know someone who professes to be the world's foremost expert on moodily lit tubes of toothpaste!
So how are we gonna make this happen?
Well there is this big space goat you see....
Yes, you can read all about it at http://spacegoatse.cx/
Or we can try a modern day example: expertsexchange
experts-exchange
expert-sex-change
I remembered in the good old days, my network access got suspended once because they triggered a naive web url history scanner....
I assume they also blocked the partner sites:
amateursexchange.com
and
diysexchange.com
Really? ABC-Disney is the largest? I thought for sure the largest conglomerate was NBC-Universal which owns at least 10 channels in the U.S., an Europe-wide channel, and also various broadcast stations in Australia and Japan. That would make FOX-Murdoch a distant fourth, after the ABC, CBS, NBC oligarchs.
Back to article-
I'm surprised the BBC gives-away free news on the web. They block their radio and television programs from being seen by anyone who has not paid a TV/radio license (UK citizens), so I would expect them to do the same for text. (shrug)
Minor correction: NBC-Universal owns a number of cable channels in Australia, the only relationship with any of the local FTA (broadcast) stations is the occasional sharing of news items.
Nice idea! Unfortunately almost every slashdot article past, present and future would fall foul of your proposed anti-Godwin's law.
Is there an equivalent to Godwin's law referring to "OMG it's communism/socialism!"? We sure could use one these days.
When I was at University I enrolled in an Astronomy course. One weekend I arranged with one of the professors to borrow one of the departments telescopes and took a few friends from the class to the area my family lived in (about 100km outside of the city).
It turned out to be not very pleasant weather, but we waited a couple of hours and by about 1am the weather started to clear: I pointed out the Milky Way to the others who were with me and it then took me a further 1/2 hour to convince them that the stuff I was pointing to was indeed stars and not just a bunch of cloud: none of my class mates had really spent much time outside of the city.
I found this both amusing and disturbing at the same time.
...damned if you don't, seems three cups is never enough for some of us:
Coffee Lowers Gout Risk
Coffee-Swilling Men Get Less Gout, Study Shows
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
May 25, 2007 - The more coffee men drink, the lower their risk of gout. At least four cups a day lower gout risk by 40%, a Canada/U.S. study shows.
Gout starts with a buildup of uric acid in the blood. This results in deposits of uric acid crystals in the joints and surrounding areas, causing swelling and intense pain.
The new study is based on data from nearly 46,000 male medical professionals enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Over 12 years, 757 of these men developed gout, report Hyon K. Choi, MD, DrPH, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and colleagues.
Because the men filled out detailed diet questionnaires, Choi's team was able to track the men's self-reported use of coffee and tea.
They found that the more coffee the men drank, the less likely they were to have gout.
Drinking one to three cups of coffee a day lowered gout risk by only 8%. But drinking four or five cups a day dropped gout risk by 40%. And true coffee addicts -- those who drank six cups a day or more -- had nearly a 60% lower risk of gout.
Caffeine, whether from coffee, tea, or both, was not related to gout risk. Tea, it turned out, did not decrease gout risk.
But decaffeinated coffee did have an effect, although it wasn't as large as the effect of the high-test brew. Men who drank one to three cups of decaf had a 33% lower risk of gout. Those who drank four cups of decaf a day -- or more -- had only a 27% lower gout risk.
It's not clear why coffee lowers gout risk. Choi and colleagues note that coffee is a major source of a strong antioxidant, phenol chlorogenic acid, that may affect gout risk.
"Our findings are most directly generalizable to men age 40 years and older (the most gout-prevalent population) with no history of gout," Choi and colleagues suggest.
It's not yet known whether women who drink coffee are at lower risk of gout.
The findings appear in the June 2007 issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.
SOURCE: Choi, H.K. Arthritis & Rheumatism, June 2007; vol 56: pp 2048-2054.
© 2007 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.
Shamelessly pilfered from
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=81383&pf=3&page=1
(Sorry couldn't find the original source)
Ok, now I know this probably is hard to find and not free, but I play and would like to recommend Red Faction. It has many, many, many user made maps (my favorite are the Micro-faction maps - whereby you are the size of a mouse in this giant room) great gameplay, and server setting called "pure-faction" that has an anti cheat mode built into the server side.
Go to L4Y.com to join forums and download maps for free. You can start your own server and check out the maps ( some of the best are by designers Lots-o-Pot and RedFrog.)
Many of the gamers there are ages 25-55+ Even several women players...
Cya there - my player name is Bird...
I'll second that... many people often complain that the graphics aren't so hot, but it has the most addictive gameplay and a pretty solid core group of players. It's just a shame that THQ/Volition won't open source the damn thing as they did for Freespace2 and as others have done in the case of the Descent series and quake series.
The most common errors: SQL injection, command injection, cleartext transmission of Sensitive Information, etc.
People make mistakes. Software needs to ship, preferably yesterday.
How much would it cost to have perfect software? I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. So I can imagine what it would look like if Microsoft tried it.
The debugger would cost half a million dollar per seat (gdb is free). There would be an entire industry dedicated to analyzing your source code and doing all kinds of proofs, coverage, what-if analysis and other stuff that require Ph.Ds to understand the results.
The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. Hardware designers code pretty much like software developers (except the languages they use are massively parallel, but apart from that, they use the same basic constructs). Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
It's just not practical. Let the NSA order special versions of Office that cost 10 times the price and ship three years after the consumer version.
But for me, "good enough" is indeed good enough.
-- FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss
I worked within the same space about 10 years ago - I was a sysadmin for a group of asic design jockies as well as the firmware and device driver guys and I'm gonna call you on this...
The hardware designers were under the same sorts of pressures, if not more so, than the software guys and I saw many bugs that would end up in the shipping silicon. The general attitude was always "oh! a bug: well the software guys will just have to work around it."
And as for "no patching", well that's also BS, you can patch silicon, it's just rather messy having to have the factory do it post-fab by cutting traces on die.
So much for perfection!
Not necessarily the case with Australian Postgraduate Awards. When I accepted an APA scholarship I did not lose my IP rights and have a copy filed away of an explicit Uni policy of the time that states IP is mine. Note: mine was not an "Industry" APA, meaning my scolarship was funded by the AU government, not a company. Your uni might be different (I signed up with Newcastle Uni in 2004.)
Fair cop! I applied at Macquarie, but told them to stick it... partially for the IP policy.
English was clearly not your subject...
In one long sentence (probably better constructed as four): recieve, handfull, universities' (it's singular in this context), defacto (it's two words).
If you want to be an english school-marm, at least have the balls to sign in!
In Australian Universities (at least the one I work for anyway), students retain all IP rights to any research they conduct. As staff though, we get no rights for anything we come up with. Well, it used to be that way until one professor who developed a new way to treat liver cancer challenged the University he worked for. The judege ruled in his favour stating that there is no contractual 'duty to invent'. Here's the story if anyone is interested...
http://http//www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=404351§ioncode=26
Whilst this is technically correct it also misleading; yes it is true that in Australia students own the IP to anything they produce whilst doing a research degree, however, if you read the fine print on the application/enrolment form you will find that there is a clause which gives those rights back to the institution, you must sign this section to recieve any tuition fee scholarship (in Australia most graduate research students have their tuition paid by the Government but the assignment of these funds is handled by the universities' administrative unit) thus in actuality unless you are the handfull of students who are willing to stump up the $20K or so per annum yourself (or more likely your employer) then the university has defacto ownership of your IP.
William Robinson writes with news that the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument developed by NASA and sent aboard India's Chandrayaan-1, has confirmed the presence of iron-bearing minerals on the moon. This marks the beginning of an extensive examination of the composition of the lunar surface.
I'm far more interested to hear how Mr. Robinson and his family made it back from Alpha Centauri and did Dr. Smith and the Robot make the return journey with them?
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
Yes, I was half-joking, but as many other respondants have opined not only are _many_ of the practices of sales and marketing types morally questionable (to put it lightly) but frankly there is often a gaping chasm between being clever or smart and demonstrating intelligent, insight or wisdom, and most of the behaviour that is practiced by people in these as well as many other professions (professional management practices, politicians and stockbrokers come to mind) demonstrates a strong bias in aptitude for cleverness over intelligence or wisdom.
..bad form to respond to my own post I know but:
To get an insight into how thoroughly insidious marketing and sales techniques really are, you aught to do a little research into the origins of their tool of choice: advertising. Advertising itself is amoral (note I didn't say immoral), it serves the simple and required function of announcing the availability of your goods and/or services to the market. However, _modern_ (TV and film) advertising techniques have their origins in one, film, a work which is both devastatingly brilliant and breathtakingly abhorrent at the same time.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
Yes, I was half-joking, but as many other respondants have opined not only are _many_ of the practices of sales and marketing types morally questionable (to put it lightly) but frankly there is often a gaping chasm between being clever or smart and demonstrating intelligent, insight or wisdom, and most of the behaviour that is practiced by people in these as well as many other professions (professional management practices, politicians and stockbrokers come to mind) demonstrates a strong bias in aptitude for cleverness over intelligence or wisdom.
...that peer reviewed journals (at least in computer science) are crap. 1) peer review is an old boys network, 2) people don't look at substance, they look for fancy buzzwords of the month and equations that look hard (you're rewarded for the more convoluted your paper is!), and 3) the way the system is setup, 99% of what is published is crap...people at universities and labs are forced to produce as many publications as possible to get promoted. It would be unfair of me to say that all of it is useless, but it's definitely inefficient. Look at where the great ideas in computer science and software development come today...they come from the community through things like open source (e.g. Linux, BitTorrent, etc). The academic community just rides on their coattails...
I agree with the first part of your post, but at the risk of re-igniting the discussion that we've had here previously; it's quite a strech to say that the academic community simply rides the coattails of the opensource community. Yes, BitTorrent is something that would have cut it as Computer Science research but whilst Linux may be fun, useful, more secure than Windoze, and Free (as in speech) it has very little to do with computer _science_ research.
Indeed there is a yawning chasm between what academia and industry do, often this is regrettable*, however it is often so because industry and the academy have very different goals, not withstanding the idiocay that is trying to turn universities into _purely_ commercial enterprises, without blue-skies research we might as well all just go back to swinging from a tree in the jungle.
*on the part of both groups - just witness the way industry is approaching the prospect of many-cores as a pervasive platform, aided and abetted by some of the less clear thinking of those in the academy - Software Transaction Memory anyone?
The Australian government seems to have gone pretty crazy over this thing, and is taking one of the classic paths when meeting resistance; that is to make the plan even bolder and more sweeping. There seems no recognition of the fact that this won't do a damned thing to prevent the production and distribution of child pornography, but will cause no end of problems for legitimate users. But this government clearly feels it's back is against the wall, and rather than simply taking the more sensible path and admitting that filtering is flawed, and in its own way dangerous, and that any attempt to screw with various P2P and secure protocols is going to real harm to legitimate users, is basically saying "We know better than the ISPs and technical experts."
Politics tends to attract the insanely vain, but these guys are way out to lunch. I have no idea who their technical advisers are, but either these guys are morons or simply being paid to tell the government what it wants to here.
But as anyone who has dealt with any kind of Internet security can tell you, it's always a game of catch-up. Whether it's viruses, root kits, DRM, firewalls, and so on, there's always someone willing, for good or ill, to crack systems, and believe me, if they actually go through with this nonsense, the desire to crack the filters, and more dangerous and delerious attempts to bust encryption and P2P is simply going to be met with better innovations to overcome them.
But it does go to show you that the intellectual tyrannies are not simply the product of political tyrannies, but any government so sure in its own righteousness can play the part of the tyrant, simply by repeating the mantra "it's for their own good".
The Enlightenment has died in Australia, and it's sad that the people aren't marching on Adelaide demanding the government's resignation and Rudd's forced expulsion. Western Civilization has lost its balls. We've fought world wars, sacrificed our young on countless battlefields, beat back the Communists by even the most questionable means, for what? So some religious nut can make decrees as to what law-abiding citizens of a so-called free country can view on the Internet?
What a sad, fearful, pathetic lot the West has become.
Huh? I know Nick Xenophon has been exercising a little of his balance-of-power lately but last time I looked Kev'07 was from Queensland and the parliment was located in Canberra, WTF has Adelaide got to do with it?
This is such a bad idea. I think any company who buys these will be shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, in the 90s companies generally hated putting http:/// in advertising. Then they dropped the www part and just made it company.com. Now they are having their ultimate dream. To drop the .com part too. But with that comes a major problem. How are average people going to distinguish what is a internet address from something else?
Imagine this, Ford says in its advertising: "Go to ford.com". Its obvious here what to do. Now imagine they get just the TLD 'ford'. So what do you say. "Go to ford"? What the hell does that mean. Now they'll start having to say things like "Type ford into your web browser's address bar" Yeah, that's a whole lot easier to say than ford.com. Idiots.
I hope this totally backfires on all the marketing and sales people in the world so that they learn their lesson.
I don't know what planet your from, but on planet earth being intrinsically unable to learn lessons is a prerequisite for entry in sales or marketing.
This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)
What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Thanks for your comment and the links. Every time I run across an article like this and sigh, wishing I had the technical cojones to explain why it is that we were doing things like this on mainframes in the 80s with complete safety... and continuing to wonder why Intel couldn't just COPY the damned concepts if they can't figure out how to implement them from scratch.
I suspect that that is precisely what intel have done... badly
Our world continues to be saddled with a half assed operating system running on a third rate architecture and for no other reason that technology takes a back seat (or maybe it's more like back of the bus) to marketing, bribery and collusion (with an unhealthy dose of buyer ignorance thrown in for good measure).
This is simply a corollary of the Peter Principle
I continue to hope that good technology will win out eventually, although I'm almost convinced at this point that it will have to come from some country that hasn't been bought out by the Borg.
I think you hope in vain, markets bring competition but they also tend to ubiquity and uniformity, this is their downside, however centrally planned economies (or hybrid one's, as I assume the "some country" you mention is probably China) tend to end up in a pretty similar place due to bureaucratic inertia, and political corruption. In any case it is the general public's unwillingness to be more than slightly discerning in the way it consumes that ultimately drives things, it is the appeal to authority that is the problem, and the authority is not the geeky guy in the lab coat it's the marketing type in the $10K armani suit.
I wonder though, and maybe you know, why isn't the Power-PC mentioned in the Wikepedia article. I would assume because of its origin that it is closer to the 370 than to the Intel architecture in being fully virtualizable, a concept apparently not on the "roadmap" that Steve Jobs kept referring to in his rationale for Apple's switch to Intel. The Power-PC represented our best hope of escaping the Intel monoculture and I'd like nothing better than to once again have a mainstream non-Intel (and non-Intel-like) choice when I pick my next laptop.
As I have mentioned previously there is still another architecture that has the potential to knock x86 off it's pedestal, ARM outsells x86 by around 7 to 1, it is still a long shot of course but not impossible (although I wouldn't wager money on it)
Of course if Intel had a deserved (I'm being generous) third of the market then what Google is doing with this initiative would be dead in the water (as it probably should be).
Actually I'm not completely upset about what google are doing here... if we are to end up with a monoculture of x86 only it actually makes a lot of sense to take what we've learnt from x86 virtualisation and use it in novel ways, it certainly aught to be more energy efficient than java or flash.
Why not? It just means that the permissible instruction sequences are limited to a subset that can be statically analyzed and verified to be safe. The Java VM has similar verification algorithms that are run whenever untrusted code is first loaded.
It's true that this does not allow all x86 code to run; it's at least practically (and probably theoretically) impossible to correctly determine whether or not a piece of code is safe, but as long as the VM errs on the side of caution, there shouldn't be any problems with this approach.
I will grant that this makes it unclear what the advantage is over (say) Java applets. What can this technology do that the Java VM couldn't? As far as I'm concerned, the failure of Java in the browser has more to do with the lack of a standard library for high-performance multimedia applications (think: Flash) than with shortcomings in the bytecode language.
All this means is that google have created a VM in which the "bytecodes" happen to be executable on real hardware, but some of these "bytecodes" have to be intercepted and replaced at runtime with substitute code... this aught to sound familiar; this is what a software hypervisor does (eg VMware).
In other words every man and his dog has jumped aboard the "I can write an x86-hypervisor" bandwagon, the difference being that google have decided to take theirs and embed it into the browser rather than run as a standalone app.
Interestingly enough it took the momentum that VMware created to get intel to correct some of the issues with its' ISA to make it much easier to virtualise, perhaps someone the size of google can prod intel into adding a third wave of virtualisation accelartion extensions to their ISA so as to make this idea safer* with low overhead
*I think virtualisation is a useful thing (I make a living from consulting on it), however I am unconvinced of it being possible, to truly secure it.
... by someone who was both scientist and science fiction author, a little dated now perhaps, but still an excellent read:
A Choice of Catastrophes
No one cares about devices that a small percentage of population use. Plus, a large amounts of them are truck drivers, and depending on where you live, those people are heavily audited/supervised and their jobs are on the line at the slightest mistake (well, depending on how annoying their union are).
The issue with cellphones is that its almost impossible to look out on the street and NOT see someone driving with a cellphone to his/her ear, and I live in a region where thats illegal! Imagine where its not!
Like with most all other problematic bad habits, its never an issue until a significant chunk of people do it.
You are probably right, but my curiosity would still love to know if the less natural form of communication that CB emphasises (short bursts terminating with the keyword - "over") makes a significant difference to the impact on ones driving skills.
There have been so many studies into the effects of mobile phone use, but does anyone know of a study that shows that cell phone usage is any worse than using another comms devices such as a CB or UHF unit whilst driving?
Actually, I think it's really more the context that matters, which you kind of point out with the phrase "literal truth", versus I suppose "philosophical truth"(?). My murderer above claimed innocence, but he lied so this was not truth. Literal truth. Kindness is preferable to cruelty. Philosophical Truth? Anyway, I'm just having fun with words and concepts, and that's the truth :)
Yes it's all about context, but when the context is not exactly crystal clear there is what you might call a default contextual meaning which I am arguing has changed.
Now of course languages evolve (unless they're dead like Latin), but over the last 100 years English hasn't so much evolved but has undergone a kind of derranged intelligent design where the driving force hasn't been the evolving demands of the english speaking world but instead it has been the at whim of the coke-snorting advertising execs and the squalid opportunists in PR-firms who have managed (without the conscious effort a conspiracy-theory would require) to turn Orwell's idea of Newspeak into a reality.