What worries the ISPs is without that file-sharing then there's no real reason to have a sweet 20Mb/s connection and we might as well all downgrade to a bargain-basement 512kb/s connection as all we're going to be able to download is our emails and a few safe content-free BPI-approved websites. The ISPs are caught between a rock and a hard place - if they let filesharing happen they get fined and, if they don't, then they lose lucrative customers
I don't think this is true. The lucrative customers are the ones that buy a high-bandwidth service, but use it for its low-latency qualities without using significant bandwidth (think gamers). Filesharers are a cost for the ISP, because bandwidth costs them real money. If they can find a way to take the filesharers' money, but legitimately deny them bandwidth, they'll make a killing. It's the "legitimately" bit that's the problem, though - to cut someone's connection on the say-so of an unvetted third party is to go begging for law-suits. There's also the issue of who pays for the cutting-off process. The ISPs are saying that the BPI should contribute, and the BPI are saying it's the ISPs' duty...
...which won't work when the music's watermarked (http://www.google.com/patents?id=J3eBAAAAEBAJ&dq=7,266,697) and all your TPM hardware refuses to play it, or possibly even to record it...
I was chatting to a MS employee about exactly this problem last year - I was holding forth on the need for (people like) archivists to be able to open legacy document formats, and apparently there's quite a movement for virtual machines with the right OS and Office versions to be made available for libraries and so on. I'm pretty sure this has actually been done, but I can't remember who for.
Yup. It helps enormously that one of the most prevalent CPU architectures (ARM) also happens to have a gorgeous instruction set, so if you do learn that then it's both practical and (relatively) easy. I'd say that anyone doing computer-related engineering (be that electronic engineering, software engineering, whatever) should have been exposed to it as a precondition of being on the course, but then I'm biased like that.
First off, what makes you think that dogs don't do math? Just think about their brains controlling their muscles. Somehow they have to be calculating how much neuronal stimulation to apply to a muscle to get the desired amount of force. Isn't that math?
Why are UK government IT projects always doomed to failure?
Because civil servants have no idea how to protect themselves from getting shafted by software suppliers, and no financial incentive to learn, essentially. Also, the government has an extreme aversion to suing its suppliers, so the same suppliers do the same thing every time.
Ignorance leads to incompetence. I don't view incompetence as an insult here - it's a simple statement of fact. Security is one of those fields where almost everyone is incompetent, but most don't know it yet. It *is* that hard.
You can't blame admins who haven't been instructed properly, but you can certainly blame kernel developers who haven't clearly communicated what their tools are to be used for.
It's not the kernel devs' job to explain the POSIX spec. It is the downstream admins' job to check the spec of the system they're administrating.
I'm rather weary of the "I have a bigger pen^H^H^H brain than you do" bullshit that goes on in IT.
In this case, Alan does have a bigger pen than most of us.
7Zip has become a de facto replacement for WinZip around my neck of the woods already. Apart from anything else, GMail filters.zip files, but lets.7zs through. Even ignoring the fact that on average (strictly in my experience).7z files are half the size of.zip files, that fact alone is enough to swing the deal.
Whether it's your wish or not, you agreed to it by clicking "I Accept" without fully having read or understood the conditions to which you accepted. It's not your code, it's their code, and their license terms with you give them permission to do what they will with that code, including refusing to allow you to continue to use it, void your contract without refund, and disable the product.
That misses the point, as far as I'm concerned. I've seen auto-applied patches break renderfarm nodes; naturally Windows Update was switched off after that little incident. If this state of affairs means that I can no longer rely on that measure to stop the OS from shifting under my feet, I can't use Windows to provide a reliable service. I expect, and need, the OS to be the same when I wake up as when I went to sleep - that way, I know that anything that's gone wrong overnight is either because of something I did, or hardware failure.
Use the tool as it is meant to be used. PHP is a language. A framework is a framework. Please don't compare them on the same level.
Except that in this case, the comparison is valid. PHP without a framework is, if you will, the null framework. Its advantages are that there is no learning curve, deployment is trivial, and there's no runtime framework overhead to heat up your CPUs. On the other hand, it doesn't help you at all in writing the app, and once your site gets beyond a certain size you'll probably end up writing a framework anyway - as it sounds like you've done, after a fashion.
This guy's not an idiot. He must know that if a universal DNA database was brought online, not only would it cost a *huge* amount to implement, but convictions would skyrocket. We're already out of prison space, so I think he's putting this forward as an option purely for the backlash it will cause. In the light of this suggestion, it becomes politically feasible to legislate for fewer imprisonable offences (for example), and it shows the people who already are arguing for more sensible management of the existing data in a favourable light. My money's on the DNA data for unconvicted people being deleted after a fixed period, when the dust settles. Either way, I'm glad that the proposal's been made at a time when it's politically acceptable to resist it - it'll help stave off a time when it isn't.
Precisely the same way you assign them now - if you don't take an exam, you don't get a grade in the subject. I don't see the problem. Unless the numbers are ridiculously small (as they may be for classical Greek, for example), you should always be guaranteed a statistically significant sample size.
Allow me to create a word. omnicide: the act of the murder of every human being and all civilization.
Google says you're not the first, but what the hell...
These submarines exist for one reason: They exist to kill every human being on earth.
That's almost precisely backwards. These submarines exist to ensure that never happens. They're part of the Mutually Assured Destruction balance. Neither side is going to launch a first strike unless it knows with absolute certainty that it's going to come out sufficiently ahead in the ensuing trade-off to survive as a viable state. Nuclear subs completely screw with any certainty you might think you've got in launching that attack, because it's damn near impossible to know that you'll be able to kill enough of the opposition's subs before they can launch. Stealthy propellers are a big part of that, helping to ensure that the enemy can't get and keep a lock on your position. These submarines aren't designed as first-strike weapons, but as an assured second-strike. To say that this technology cannot be used completely misses the point. In just existing, they are being used - as an insurance policy. If they were ever to launch, humanity would already be dead.
But actually there's another possibility - the rates are only an average for all GCSEs, and one possibility is that people are switching to easier subjects. So it's not that any given exam is easier, but that some subjects are easier to get an A.
And this is a factor it would be utterly trivial to correct for, just by normalising the marks and assigning grades per proportion of the population. It drives me absolutely insane that they don't do this across the board. It would also completely do away with any suggestion of grade inflation, because if you're in the top 10%, you're in the top 10%, and that's the *only* measure that actually matters to universities and employers - the actual mark you get is utterly irrelevant.
1. No one in the administration ever said or implied that "Saddam" had anything more than passing ties to anything related with 9/11. No one in the administration ever said Iraq (or Saddam) was responsible for 9/11. Yes, they looked for evidence immediately after 9/11. It appeared that Al-Qaeda *could* have had meetings with persons related with Saddam's government.
Minor point:
To date we have arrested, or otherwise dealt with, many key commanders of al-Qaeda. They include a man who directed logistics and funding for the 11 September attacks.... Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody, reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.... Before 11 September 2001, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained.
- George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 28th January 2003.
That's more than an implication. That's as close as you get to saying "He did it!" without having to show evidence.
Oh, it gets better... have a read of the discussion on this page: http://jacklewis.net/weblog/archives/2007/08/firef ox_is_now.php when it comes back up. You'll enjoy Mr Carlton's insistence that : - W3C standards don't matter, except when pointing out which bits Firefox fails to satisfy - Firefox is broken because it doesn't support an IE-only DHTML extension - Two years ago IE6 was technically more advanced than Firefox - Firefox is the only browser available on Linux - Conqueror(sic) is a common browser choice on Windows - Anyone not knowing these things is less capable a web developer than he is It'd be hilarious but for the fact that I think he believes it.
I say this as someone who's actually signed up and participated in a patent discussion, so this isn't just uninformed waffle.
There are two problems that I've identified with the process so far. The first is that the examiner who's assigned to the patent doesn't seem to take part in the discussions around the patent. That would be extremely valuable to keep discussions on track, so that we as a community can help find more relevant material. A lot of discussion that I've seen starts off with "I've read the abstract, I don't like the idea, here's why" without actually producing anything of value in terms of admissible prior art, or evidence of non-obviousness. That starting point is almost completely useless - it's just noise, especially if the points raised are easily countered simply by reading the first couple of claims. If there were more dialogue visible (especially with an examiner at the wheel), I believe that would happen less. This brings me to the second problem.
There just aren't enough people taking part. We need more people. The range of the patents being discussed is really quite broad. A population of 1000+ just doesn't have enough people in it to guarantee that someone with a deep understanding of the area of each patent is going to be present. However, I think that this is caused by how few patents are actually in the system. People arrive, hearing about the project from articles such as this, see that none of the patents particularly interest them, and leave. It doesn't help that the sign-up process is tricky to navigate. I hope that this will change over time as more patents are added into the system, but the risk is that in the intervening period the project will be seen as not being effective and will be canned. That would be a crying shame - it has the potential to make a real difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly, in the "Nice hack!" sense...
I don't think this is true. The lucrative customers are the ones that buy a high-bandwidth service, but use it for its low-latency qualities without using significant bandwidth (think gamers). Filesharers are a cost for the ISP, because bandwidth costs them real money. If they can find a way to take the filesharers' money, but legitimately deny them bandwidth, they'll make a killing. It's the "legitimately" bit that's the problem, though - to cut someone's connection on the say-so of an unvetted third party is to go begging for law-suits. There's also the issue of who pays for the cutting-off process. The ISPs are saying that the BPI should contribute, and the BPI are saying it's the ISPs' duty...
Yup. That calculation doesn't factor in the risk that the deal might not happen.
...which won't work when the music's watermarked (http://www.google.com/patents?id=J3eBAAAAEBAJ&dq=7,266,697) and all your TPM hardware refuses to play it, or possibly even to record it...
I was chatting to a MS employee about exactly this problem last year - I was holding forth on the need for (people like) archivists to be able to open legacy document formats, and apparently there's quite a movement for virtual machines with the right OS and Office versions to be made available for libraries and so on. I'm pretty sure this has actually been done, but I can't remember who for.
Yup. It helps enormously that one of the most prevalent CPU architectures (ARM) also happens to have a gorgeous instruction set, so if you do learn that then it's both practical and (relatively) easy. I'd say that anyone doing computer-related engineering (be that electronic engineering, software engineering, whatever) should have been exposed to it as a precondition of being on the course, but then I'm biased like that.
First off, what makes you think that dogs don't do math? Just think about their brains controlling their muscles. Somehow they have to be calculating how much neuronal stimulation to apply to a muscle to get the desired amount of force. Isn't that math?
I don't know about dogs, but I do know about leeches:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain/mg15821395.100
I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, but that should be Godwin...
Why are UK government IT projects always doomed to failure?
Because civil servants have no idea how to protect themselves from getting shafted by software suppliers, and no financial incentive to learn, essentially. Also, the government has an extreme aversion to suing its suppliers, so the same suppliers do the same thing every time.
Ignorance leads to incompetence. I don't view incompetence as an insult here - it's a simple statement of fact. Security is one of those fields where almost everyone is incompetent, but most don't know it yet. It *is* that hard.
It's not the kernel devs' job to explain the POSIX spec. It is the downstream admins' job to check the spec of the system they're administrating.
In this case, Alan does have a bigger pen than most of us.
7Zip has become a de facto replacement for WinZip around my neck of the woods already. Apart from anything else, GMail filters .zip files, but lets .7zs through. Even ignoring the fact that on average (strictly in my experience) .7z files are half the size of .zip files, that fact alone is enough to swing the deal.
I'm sure your job doesn't involve a HALO drop. That's what this is for.
That misses the point, as far as I'm concerned. I've seen auto-applied patches break renderfarm nodes; naturally Windows Update was switched off after that little incident. If this state of affairs means that I can no longer rely on that measure to stop the OS from shifting under my feet, I can't use Windows to provide a reliable service. I expect, and need, the OS to be the same when I wake up as when I went to sleep - that way, I know that anything that's gone wrong overnight is either because of something I did, or hardware failure.
Except that in this case, the comparison is valid. PHP without a framework is, if you will, the null framework. Its advantages are that there is no learning curve, deployment is trivial, and there's no runtime framework overhead to heat up your CPUs. On the other hand, it doesn't help you at all in writing the app, and once your site gets beyond a certain size you'll probably end up writing a framework anyway - as it sounds like you've done, after a fashion.
Seasonal changes would make that really quite tricky, not to mention the effect of the time of day on shadows...
This guy's not an idiot. He must know that if a universal DNA database was brought online, not only would it cost a *huge* amount to implement, but convictions would skyrocket. We're already out of prison space, so I think he's putting this forward as an option purely for the backlash it will cause. In the light of this suggestion, it becomes politically feasible to legislate for fewer imprisonable offences (for example), and it shows the people who already are arguing for more sensible management of the existing data in a favourable light. My money's on the DNA data for unconvicted people being deleted after a fixed period, when the dust settles. Either way, I'm glad that the proposal's been made at a time when it's politically acceptable to resist it - it'll help stave off a time when it isn't.
Precisely the same way you assign them now - if you don't take an exam, you don't get a grade in the subject. I don't see the problem. Unless the numbers are ridiculously small (as they may be for classical Greek, for example), you should always be guaranteed a statistically significant sample size.
Google says you're not the first, but what the hell...
That's almost precisely backwards. These submarines exist to ensure that never happens. They're part of the Mutually Assured Destruction balance. Neither side is going to launch a first strike unless it knows with absolute certainty that it's going to come out sufficiently ahead in the ensuing trade-off to survive as a viable state. Nuclear subs completely screw with any certainty you might think you've got in launching that attack, because it's damn near impossible to know that you'll be able to kill enough of the opposition's subs before they can launch. Stealthy propellers are a big part of that, helping to ensure that the enemy can't get and keep a lock on your position. These submarines aren't designed as first-strike weapons, but as an assured second-strike. To say that this technology cannot be used completely misses the point. In just existing, they are being used - as an insurance policy. If they were ever to launch, humanity would already be dead.
And this is a factor it would be utterly trivial to correct for, just by normalising the marks and assigning grades per proportion of the population. It drives me absolutely insane that they don't do this across the board. It would also completely do away with any suggestion of grade inflation, because if you're in the top 10%, you're in the top 10%, and that's the *only* measure that actually matters to universities and employers - the actual mark you get is utterly irrelevant.
Minor point: - George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 28th January 2003.
That's more than an implication. That's as close as you get to saying "He did it!" without having to show evidence.
Oh, it gets better... have a read of the discussion on this page: http://jacklewis.net/weblog/archives/2007/08/firef ox_is_now.php when it comes back up. You'll enjoy Mr Carlton's insistence that :
- W3C standards don't matter, except when pointing out which bits Firefox fails to satisfy
- Firefox is broken because it doesn't support an IE-only DHTML extension
- Two years ago IE6 was technically more advanced than Firefox
- Firefox is the only browser available on Linux
- Conqueror(sic) is a common browser choice on Windows
- Anyone not knowing these things is less capable a web developer than he is
It'd be hilarious but for the fact that I think he believes it.
One wouldn't stand much of a chance, but a collective might. Hell, an indie label with its own station might not be such a bad idea in its own right.
I say this as someone who's actually signed up and participated in a patent discussion, so this isn't just uninformed waffle.
There are two problems that I've identified with the process so far. The first is that the examiner who's assigned to the patent doesn't seem to take part in the discussions around the patent. That would be extremely valuable to keep discussions on track, so that we as a community can help find more relevant material. A lot of discussion that I've seen starts off with "I've read the abstract, I don't like the idea, here's why" without actually producing anything of value in terms of admissible prior art, or evidence of non-obviousness. That starting point is almost completely useless - it's just noise, especially if the points raised are easily countered simply by reading the first couple of claims. If there were more dialogue visible (especially with an examiner at the wheel), I believe that would happen less. This brings me to the second problem.
There just aren't enough people taking part. We need more people. The range of the patents being discussed is really quite broad. A population of 1000+ just doesn't have enough people in it to guarantee that someone with a deep understanding of the area of each patent is going to be present. However, I think that this is caused by how few patents are actually in the system. People arrive, hearing about the project from articles such as this, see that none of the patents particularly interest them, and leave. It doesn't help that the sign-up process is tricky to navigate. I hope that this will change over time as more patents are added into the system, but the risk is that in the intervening period the project will be seen as not being effective and will be canned. That would be a crying shame - it has the potential to make a real difference.
You're forgetting that, unlike OpenID, Passport already has a huge number of users. It stands a good chance of winning by default.
Broader language support, for one thing. Ruby and Python beat ActionScript in my mind.