I hear they're cracking down on all submersive sites. From now on, Yahoo can't link to any sites that discuss:
scuba-diving
submarines
skinny-dipping
Olympic diving
Jacques Cousteau
the Titanic
I wonder if the Chinese government has organizational rabies - that would explain this weird hydrophobia that they seem to have now. Or maybe they just never learned to swim?
One of the intrinsic problems is that Office files are dumped to disk in binary chunks (that's right, straight out of RAM in some spots, with all the compiler and architecture issues that this entails) which won't necessarily load properly in other versions of Word, let alone other programs. This is well documented to be true; part of the reason that no independent.doc spec exists is because it would be very difficult for even Microsoft to reverse-engineer the spec from their tangle of spaghetti code at this point. It's a miracle that StarOffice and friends get as close as they do.
That's funny, I don't recall my insurance agency mentioning any restrictions that my car had to be in "stock" condition in order to retain insurance. Although I imagine that if I introduced a problem that resulted in an accident, they'd be happy to not pay any proceeds.
I think that El Taco has finally done what I've been saying he should do all along: don't have a karma cap, but for very high karma don't display the actual number. Which allows you to chalk up good karma in order to survive a few bad moderations, but doesn't let you see the actual karma value and boast about it.
Now if I could only get back my moderator/meta-moderator access, I'd be in good shape.
It is hypocrisy if you're always trumpeting "eating your own dog food", and especially if you're trying to sell other large software development projects on using SourceSafe. Supposedly the software does meet the "enterprise" demands placed upon it, so why isn't Microsoft using it?
Hmmm. I'll admit, having tried this, that Windows is possibly approaching the utility of *nix man pages. Although poking around in a binary registry still seems like a counterintuitive way to configure a command-line tool, but I guess that's just me.
So would this have been "help tab-completion" or "help TAB" or "help registry" or what?
I won't argue that some configuration is easier for a newbie to do by hand under Windows than under Linux. But it's interesting that when you want to do something complicated or advanced, you're essentially back to the Linux method of digging into an obscure configuration hierarchy, but in a binary database rather than a simple text file, and without the helpful comments that most Linux config files would have.
So whenever somebody says "oh, that's easy, just frob your registry key ABC to be undocumented value XYZ", I have to poke fun at the darker side of the Windows configuration user experience. Because Windows doesn't really provide the seamless and easy configuration experience that y'all seem to think it does; it just shoves the tough stuff under the rug.
With an appropriate server farm setup, you can upgrade the machines on a rolling basis and still provide a given level of uptime for the service as a whole. Just use some of your excess capacity for a day as you do the rolling upgrade.
Which is probably why netcraft doesn't try to distinguish between server clusters, etc. - the whole point is to get uptime for the web service, and the best way to do so is usually by using multiple machines to do it.
He probably also mentioned how all those other telescopes aren't as "safe" now that he's driving a rollover-in-waiting, didn't he? I love how my car is somehow "unsafe" in a collision now, just because everyone else is driving a Land Whale.
As far as tracking goes, the Green Bank radio telescope (see also my post farther down) uses adaptive computer control of the telescope surface, including laser ranging to each of the surface panels coupled to actuators that can restore the surface's shape in the face of wind, gravity, or other problems (tip a telescope that big down to 5 degrees from the horizon and you definitely will see gravity pulling it out of shape). Eventually this control will be "closed-loop"; the system will automatically detect deformation of the telescope surface and restore the proper shape.
It seems like this might be a reasonable approach to keeping large optical telescopes in shape; just put actuators at the mirror corners and use the same laser ranging method. You might have to tighten up the measurement tolerances since a fraction of a radio wave is much larger than a fraction of a light wave, but the GBT is 1990 or earlier technology so I imagine we can do a lot better today.
Although really I don't see much point in building such a large optical telescope on the Earth's surface anyway; most of the deformation issues with compound elements should be a lot easier to deal with in space, the Earth's atmosphere is, if anything, getting worse at the moment, you have to care about the weather, etc.
Exactly - these optical folks with their "overwhelming" and "stupendous" telescopes are really small fry.
For example, the Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest fully steerable telescope, with an oblong surface measuring 100 by 110 meters and a surface area of 8000 square meters. It is taller than the Statue of Liberty. It looms over the West Virginia countryside like something out of Star Wars.
Something is very confusing here - if it's already multithreaded, then the whole program isn't blocked waiting for input. And the thread that's waiting for input should be using a blocking interrupt-driven call to get the password, rather than polling for whether the user typed it or not. There's no reason for a process or thread that's blocked waiting for input to use any CPU time, so there should be no "execution time" impact. Reducing time waiting for user input would improve the overall time to complete the job, but it's not really applicable to questions of processor loading for a computationally intensive task, which is what profiling's really for.
I think this is a clever troll, and some moderator fell for it. Looking at your diary pretty much proves this point. But you had me going there for a minute, so good job in that respect.
Granted, an immediate change of government would be at best turbulent; it is not the safest short-term route for any people to take under almost any circumstances. Neither was the American Revolution. The important question, of course, is whether it is a long-term benefit to that people.
Shouldn't the Chinese government be, by right, the responsibility of the Chinese people? I don't see how the people could ever irresponsibly overthrow the government; a government exists at their bidding, not the other way around. If the people don't want the government, then they are the only ones who can say if they are acting responsibly or not. Is it irresponsible to incite the overthrow of a government, one which you believe morally to be corrupt? I guess it depends on whether you find the greater irresponsibility in the overthrow of the government, or in its continuance in power. Maybe that decision is not for you or I or the Falun Gong leader in NYC to make; but it is a decision which falls reasonably within the purview of a Chinese Falun Gong practitioner of conscience who lives in China and wants the best for the future of China.
I agree with you that religion imposed from outside would be a dangerous thing for any people. (Although I question whether having a leader in NYC really makes a religion which is overwhelmingly made up of native Chinese participants an "outside religion", but never mind.) So how is it so much better to have a religion (or the lack of it) imposed from above by an oligarchy? What makes the rulers of the Chinese Communist party so much more enlightened in their understanding of the "correct" religion for China than, say, millions of Hindus, Muslims, or Christians, or the Falun Gong leader in NYC? The real problem is control over the religion of the populace; once there is no imposed control, the population will adhere to a religion (or not) as meets their needs.
You talk about mutual respect, but then you advocate religious and political paternalism for the Chinese people. Is it respectful to say that people are somehow not "ready" to make their own political or religious choices? I think that you have exactly as much respect for the average Chinese person and their need for basic human liberties as the Chinese Communist party leaders (and many in the West, I am sad to admit). Perhaps you should consider thinking of them as human beings first, with expectations of certain inalienable human liberties (no matter their current educational or economic state), and Chinese second.
Hmmm, by complaining that a religious movement is embarrassing the government, it sounds like you'll do anything to help the Chinese government. If you really wanted to help the people, shouldn't you be more supportive of their freedom of religion? Whether or not you or the Chinese government approve of the religion or its leadership is really beside the point; religious freedom includes the freedom to follow a wacko if you want (c.f. Scientology).
It is true - Microsoft has basically been running a WorldCom-esque strategy for quite a while, based on keeping the stock price high and using that paper to remunerate employees and consume other parts of the computer market. (OK, no massive internal accounting fraud (unless you count some serious "earnings smoothing"), but the Microsoft is another company like WorldCom that can only really survive by growing). Pending legislative attempts to require employee stock options to be accounted as expenses would be the worst thing to ever happen to Microsoft.
Hopefully the tech economy can survive the crunch when they fall.
I would have to think that the U.S. military could tell the difference between small arms or even automatic hand weapon fire, and anti-aircraft fire, though. AA is an almost entirely different sort of munition, right? It's usually delivered by surface-to-air missile batteries in this day and age.
Firing a weapon into the air is dangerous (when the bullet gets back to head height it's at approximately muzzle velocity again, or so I've heard), but I don't think anyone in an F-16 is really under threat from it.
Now, if there was real anti-aircraft fire coming from the same area, then that's different.
The system doesn't seem to be working when it comes to the interface between existing laws and the new opportunities provided by the Internet. That is why we're concerned; if court rulings were made that appeared to actually understand how the 'net works, then we wouldn't care near so much.
Maybe y'all should hire some better experts next time around?
Slashdot Mirror
I hear they're cracking down on all submersive sites. From now on, Yahoo can't link to any sites that discuss:
I wonder if the Chinese government has organizational rabies - that would explain this weird hydrophobia that they seem to have now. Or maybe they just never learned to swim?
One of the intrinsic problems is that Office files are dumped to disk in binary chunks (that's right, straight out of RAM in some spots, with all the compiler and architecture issues that this entails) which won't necessarily load properly in other versions of Word, let alone other programs. This is well documented to be true; part of the reason that no independent .doc spec exists is because it would be very difficult for even Microsoft to reverse-engineer the spec from their tangle of spaghetti code at this point. It's a miracle that StarOffice and friends get as close as they do.
That's funny, I don't recall my insurance agency mentioning any restrictions that my car had to be in "stock" condition in order to retain insurance. Although I imagine that if I introduced a problem that resulted in an accident, they'd be happy to not pay any proceeds.
Dood!
Sw33t!
Sw33t!
Dood!
"Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?"
I think that El Taco has finally done what I've been saying he should do all along: don't have a karma cap, but for very high karma don't display the actual number. Which allows you to chalk up good karma in order to survive a few bad moderations, but doesn't let you see the actual karma value and boast about it.
Now if I could only get back my moderator/meta-moderator access, I'd be in good shape.
MacGyver
You mean like "America's Team", the Atlanta Braves? Gack.
Sounds like you need to lock your users down a little more; there's your primary security problem.
It is hypocrisy if you're always trumpeting "eating your own dog food", and especially if you're trying to sell other large software development projects on using SourceSafe. Supposedly the software does meet the "enterprise" demands placed upon it, so why isn't Microsoft using it?
Hmmm. I'll admit, having tried this, that Windows is possibly approaching the utility of *nix man pages. Although poking around in a binary registry still seems like a counterintuitive way to configure a command-line tool, but I guess that's just me.
So would this have been "help tab-completion" or "help TAB" or "help registry" or what?
I won't argue that some configuration is easier for a newbie to do by hand under Windows than under Linux. But it's interesting that when you want to do something complicated or advanced, you're essentially back to the Linux method of digging into an obscure configuration hierarchy, but in a binary database rather than a simple text file, and without the helpful comments that most Linux config files would have.
So whenever somebody says "oh, that's easy, just frob your registry key ABC to be undocumented value XYZ", I have to poke fun at the darker side of the Windows configuration user experience. Because Windows doesn't really provide the seamless and easy configuration experience that y'all seem to think it does; it just shoves the tough stuff under the rug.
Well, I'm glad to see that configuration options on Windows are easy for the user to figure out and change. Oh, wait :)
With an appropriate server farm setup, you can upgrade the machines on a rolling basis and still provide a given level of uptime for the service as a whole. Just use some of your excess capacity for a day as you do the rolling upgrade.
Which is probably why netcraft doesn't try to distinguish between server clusters, etc. - the whole point is to get uptime for the web service, and the best way to do so is usually by using multiple machines to do it.
He probably also mentioned how all those other telescopes aren't as "safe" now that he's driving a rollover-in-waiting, didn't he? I love how my car is somehow "unsafe" in a collision now, just because everyone else is driving a Land Whale.
As far as tracking goes, the Green Bank radio telescope (see also my post farther down) uses adaptive computer control of the telescope surface, including laser ranging to each of the surface panels coupled to actuators that can restore the surface's shape in the face of wind, gravity, or other problems (tip a telescope that big down to 5 degrees from the horizon and you definitely will see gravity pulling it out of shape). Eventually this control will be "closed-loop"; the system will automatically detect deformation of the telescope surface and restore the proper shape.
It seems like this might be a reasonable approach to keeping large optical telescopes in shape; just put actuators at the mirror corners and use the same laser ranging method. You might have to tighten up the measurement tolerances since a fraction of a radio wave is much larger than a fraction of a light wave, but the GBT is 1990 or earlier technology so I imagine we can do a lot better today.
Although really I don't see much point in building such a large optical telescope on the Earth's surface anyway; most of the deformation issues with compound elements should be a lot easier to deal with in space, the Earth's atmosphere is, if anything, getting worse at the moment, you have to care about the weather, etc.
Exactly - these optical folks with their "overwhelming" and "stupendous" telescopes are really small fry.
For example, the Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest fully steerable telescope, with an oblong surface measuring 100 by 110 meters and a surface area of 8000 square meters. It is taller than the Statue of Liberty. It looms over the West Virginia countryside like something out of Star Wars.
"Overwhelmingly Large" my ass!
Are you kidding? Probably five or ten people have submitted it, and been turned down :)
Not that I know for sure, but that's normally how article submission works around here.
Something is very confusing here - if it's already multithreaded, then the whole program isn't blocked waiting for input. And the thread that's waiting for input should be using a blocking interrupt-driven call to get the password, rather than polling for whether the user typed it or not. There's no reason for a process or thread that's blocked waiting for input to use any CPU time, so there should be no "execution time" impact. Reducing time waiting for user input would improve the overall time to complete the job, but it's not really applicable to questions of processor loading for a computationally intensive task, which is what profiling's really for.
I think this is a clever troll, and some moderator fell for it. Looking at your diary pretty much proves this point. But you had me going there for a minute, so good job in that respect.
Oh yeah, while I'm thinking about it:
3000th post! Yay me!
Granted, an immediate change of government would be at best turbulent; it is not the safest short-term route for any people to take under almost any circumstances. Neither was the American Revolution. The important question, of course, is whether it is a long-term benefit to that people.
Shouldn't the Chinese government be, by right, the responsibility of the Chinese people? I don't see how the people could ever irresponsibly overthrow the government; a government exists at their bidding, not the other way around. If the people don't want the government, then they are the only ones who can say if they are acting responsibly or not. Is it irresponsible to incite the overthrow of a government, one which you believe morally to be corrupt? I guess it depends on whether you find the greater irresponsibility in the overthrow of the government, or in its continuance in power. Maybe that decision is not for you or I or the Falun Gong leader in NYC to make; but it is a decision which falls reasonably within the purview of a Chinese Falun Gong practitioner of conscience who lives in China and wants the best for the future of China.
I agree with you that religion imposed from outside would be a dangerous thing for any people. (Although I question whether having a leader in NYC really makes a religion which is overwhelmingly made up of native Chinese participants an "outside religion", but never mind.) So how is it so much better to have a religion (or the lack of it) imposed from above by an oligarchy? What makes the rulers of the Chinese Communist party so much more enlightened in their understanding of the "correct" religion for China than, say, millions of Hindus, Muslims, or Christians, or the Falun Gong leader in NYC? The real problem is control over the religion of the populace; once there is no imposed control, the population will adhere to a religion (or not) as meets their needs.
You talk about mutual respect, but then you advocate religious and political paternalism for the Chinese people. Is it respectful to say that people are somehow not "ready" to make their own political or religious choices? I think that you have exactly as much respect for the average Chinese person and their need for basic human liberties as the Chinese Communist party leaders (and many in the West, I am sad to admit). Perhaps you should consider thinking of them as human beings first, with expectations of certain inalienable human liberties (no matter their current educational or economic state), and Chinese second.
Hmmm, by complaining that a religious movement is embarrassing the government, it sounds like you'll do anything to help the Chinese government. If you really wanted to help the people, shouldn't you be more supportive of their freedom of religion? Whether or not you or the Chinese government approve of the religion or its leadership is really beside the point; religious freedom includes the freedom to follow a wacko if you want (c.f. Scientology).
It is true - Microsoft has basically been running a WorldCom-esque strategy for quite a while, based on keeping the stock price high and using that paper to remunerate employees and consume other parts of the computer market. (OK, no massive internal accounting fraud (unless you count some serious "earnings smoothing"), but the Microsoft is another company like WorldCom that can only really survive by growing). Pending legislative attempts to require employee stock options to be accounted as expenses would be the worst thing to ever happen to Microsoft.
Hopefully the tech economy can survive the crunch when they fall.
I would have to think that the U.S. military could tell the difference between small arms or even automatic hand weapon fire, and anti-aircraft fire, though. AA is an almost entirely different sort of munition, right? It's usually delivered by surface-to-air missile batteries in this day and age.
Firing a weapon into the air is dangerous (when the bullet gets back to head height it's at approximately muzzle velocity again, or so I've heard), but I don't think anyone in an F-16 is really under threat from it.
Now, if there was real anti-aircraft fire coming from the same area, then that's different.
The system doesn't seem to be working when it comes to the interface between existing laws and the new opportunities provided by the Internet. That is why we're concerned; if court rulings were made that appeared to actually understand how the 'net works, then we wouldn't care near so much.
Maybe y'all should hire some better experts next time around?