But in the event that Perelman's is incorrect, his humility and lack of hubris regarding his solution definitely earns him my respect, and undoubtedly that of many others in the field.
I think its more likely that the sheer brilliance of his work earns Perelman the respect of others in the field. I've been to a couple of
talks by people who had spent months wading through Perelman's papers.
Their opinion was that regardless of whether or not some error was found preventing the work from being a full proof of the Poincare conjecture, the research was undoubtedly brilliant and would greatly
advance the field.
There are plenty of arrogant bastards in mathematics who still earn lots of respect for their work. Perelman goes a step farther and, with his humility, earns some admiration as a person as well. At least from those of us who are watching the process at some distance...
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, one way around
this problem is to use hardware which can be emulated in other hardware.
The problem with this approach is that if you want to assume that
a perfect emulator of your hardware will always be available you
need to use highly standardized hardware. With the commoditized hardware of today its a stretch to imagine perfect emulation for any
given component besides maybe the CPU. In the personal computing world, the closest to perfect emulation of an old machine is for something like the commodore 64, where modern emulators are close to bug-for-bug support of every chip in the machine, including video and i/o. In the x86 world emulators aren't close to that level of approximation.
So the next thing you might consider is a program which doesn't depend that much on the hardware details, but uses a well-defined interface between its execution and the hardware. This "well-defined interface" is precisely what a modern operating system provides. This next level of abstraction means that you don't have to anticipate exact emulation of hardware, just emulation of hardware sufficient to run the OS and also provision of drivers for the OS to interface with either emulated or physical hardware (like video cards, disk drives, etc.) This potentially requires a lot of things to be updated in a nontrivial way for even small changes in the host platform, not very good.
I would suggest the best way to get software that could be run for 200+ years is for it to be written for a particular virtual machine. The code for both the software and the virtual machine should be open source (so long-term portable and fixable), and the virtual machine should be very well-defined and not subject to version changing. The virtual machine software should also be cross-platform today so it is easier to port to tomorrows platforms. Java is close to the right idea, but it doesn't have a single virtual machine well-enough defined across various implementations and versions, nor is it open source.
So why is it better to have a virtual machine written in say C which
has to be ported to each new hardware/OS combination rather than having the base application written in C and ported to each new hardware/OS combination? The economy of scale. The virtual machine
should have many users who will participate in the port and check for bugs. Then each coroporation/municipality/whoever who wants to run
long-term stable code doesn't have to do this porting for themselves.
For software which uses minimal I/O (no graphics whatsoever, only stdin/stdout) it probably would make more sense to keep the software in C and port it. But otherwise I/O isn't standard enough without a virtual machine...
Paul Vixie, architect of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) and president of the Internet Systems Consortium, charged that Akamai's proprietary approach to DNS makes it a single point of failure....
[I]f Akamai tried to diversify the implementation of its large-scale content-delivery network, Vixie said, the cost would "drive their accountants crazy."
This whole thread is completely degenerating into speculation and
useless theorizing. To be more concrete, I've read dozens of articles
on wikipedia and have yet to read anything Just Plain Wrong or trollishly biased. Yes, I hear you say, you're just a random slashdot reader who probably doesn't know anything anyway. I challenge YOU to find anything blatently false or biased on wikipedia. To make it fair, lets rule out anything that has been there less than 24 hours (and so hasn't had much time for review). Post links here. Go on.
In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings,'' he says.
So the "father of the DVD" is predicting its demise. ("Father" is maybe less appropriate than "midwife" -- he didn't invent anything, he just convinced the industry bigwigs to adopt it...)
To add some more to this insightful summary, let me highlight the main thrust of the article: the three c's of "commoditization", "collaboration", and "custimization."
There is a natural tendency for a dominant piece of software to stabilise ("ossify"), at which point it will head towards being a commodity item. This is the process by which a closed-source program will be overtaken by open source clones, a process which O'reilly sees taking place with, for instance, Microsoft Office.
Open source software is a natural process (yes, think process as opposed to artifact!) which takes place as a collaboration. The "winners" that the parent poster mentions are places where the collaborative process occurs freely and naturally, as opposed to the losing places where the collaboration is forced or stifled. Pretty much everything that is good about the internet comes from such open collaborative process (think the RFC process that brough TCP/IP, uucp, smtp, ftp, http/html, and so on, as well as many of the programs using those protocols).
The place for businesses to make money in the open source process is in customization -- putting together all of the pieces in the way the customer wants at the time the customer needs it. This is providing a service, rather than just a product.
There is a secondary thrust of the article as well, which I think is more interesting than what is highlighted above. O'Reilly points out that there is an increasing movement of important software from the desktop to the network. The old paradigm is that people used a computer to run programs. But things like google and amazon.com don't fit that paradigm. You don't run google, or run amazon.com. You use them, over the network. There is a big opening here, waiting for someone to come up with a better set of tools to bridge the gap that distinguishes between running programs locally and using programs on the network. Tim O'Reilly describes this missing set of tools as an "internet operating system," and characterises this as the "one ring to rule them all" for whomever most successfully fills that gap. He doesn't say it explicitly, but I think this is what Microsoft is aiming for with.net. In the coming years this war of the ring will certainly develop; how it goes remains to be seen...
One of the best spreadsheets for linux, gnumeric has
support for 100% of Excel's functions as well
as most of its other features. Its one of the highest
quality and most stable pieces of software I've ever
seen for linux. Its amazing they overlooked this
as competition.
The Next Big Thing (or maybe the current big thing) that Microsoft is pushing for
the software industry is the.NET framework. This makes it a safe bet that much of the new and updated Windows software appearing in the coming years will use and require.NET technology. What does this mean for WINE? I understand that Mono is using WINE to provide the windows widgets ("WinForms") compatability for its.NET compatible implementation.
Do you expect WINE and Mono to move closer together or merge into one project when the next Windows OS ships with.NET as an integral part?
I had a couple of college courses which used electronic textbooks. One was a mathematics course, where the online textbook was being written by the
professor as the course went along. This wasn't so
bad, but most people tended to print out the current
chapter for easier reference as we went along. In the end it would have just been more convenient to have a regular textbook. There were a few applets to provide extra content, but these were completely inessential.
The other course was a physics course, which used as a textbook a CD-ROM containing digitised copies of several physics references. That was far worse than just having a textbook. Exactly the same content, with a poorly implemented interface.
I have a lot of trouble imagining any quality course content suddenly appearing for these laptop-toting middle schoolers. I'd be willing to bet that what they get are poorly done conversions of physical textbooks, especially given the apathetic state of the textbook industry with respect to content. Most likely the laptops will only hinder education in the targetted subject areas.
Has IBM actually used its patent against anyone, or did they just get it in self-defence?
The IBM patent in question is number 4814746 and covers
some variations of the LZW compression algorithm, including (apparantly) the variation used in GIF
images. Interestingly, though this patent was granted after the UNISYS patent (and so expires later than the UNISYS patent did) the IBM filing was earlier by a matter of days so they've got a
reasonable claim of priority. The claims these patents make (apparantly) overlap with both covering the GIF image compression algorithm.
One of IBM's counter-claims against SCO in that
circus of a lawsuit is that SCO infringes this very patent. See
this thread on Groklaw. I don't know if they've had other legal disputes over the patent.
KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.
Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.
How about trying to finally get usable clipboard
support for the desktops? Maybe with the KDE and
Gnome guys actually working on X (or with X developers) this increadible cluster-f*** can be
made more sane. Not to mention asking for functional drag-and-drop.
However, since firefox has a built in 'google function' as I call it (this works by typing google [searchtopic] in the address bar and hitting enter) I must use it around 10 to 20 times a day.
You've just illustrated exactly why Microsoft search will suddenly become very popular in 2005/2006 -- whenever they make it the default method of search in the default browser/file explorer/task bar installed on 90+ percent of the desktops of all computer users. It will be right there in front of users, and probably next to impossible to configure the search tool to use anything else (like google). So, just like you, the majority of users will use the 'search function' in front of them. Which will be Microsoft search. Funny how that works...
The CMU Sandstorm team is dead in the water seven miles into the course because of a blown engine, according to this update article at the Washington Post.
I guess disabled really means that. Here's betting nobody makes it past them...
Thus spake Shanep: Many years ago (10+), just out of interest in crypto, I XOR'ed a raw audio file (my own speech) with pseudo random data (all bits, from LSB to MSB). The result, was one very noisy audio file with the speech still audible! I thought "WTF!?"
Your thought ("WTF!?") was right on target. I don't know what you actually did, but it clearly wasn't XOR the audio file with anything resembling random bits. If you XOR a message with truly random bits, the result will consist of truly random bits. This is because for each bit of message there is a 50-50 chance that you will flip that bit, and these chances are all independent. So the output bit has a 50-50 chance of being 0 or 1, independent of other output bits.
The same general principle applies when you XOR a message with pseudo-random bits. Provided the original message had no built-in correlation to the pseudo-random bit stream, the output will have as good random characteristics as the pseudo-random bit stream. In particular, it will sound like white noise when you feed it to a speaker.
Contrast this with what would happen if you AND or OR the message with a (pseudo-)random bit stream. In this case each bit has a 50-50 chance of being left unchanged and a 50-50 chance of being set to zero (AND) or one (OR). This would produce an output like you describe; it would sound like a noisy version of the original file. If I had to guess, this is what you actually did.
pentalive wrote:... If you install Linux on your gateway - you void the warrenty.
The same is true for Compaq, at least their laptops
marketed through Circuit City. The salesperson let
me know this when I asked him if he knew anything
about how well the hardware was supported under
Linux. He said that some other customers had had trouble getting under-warranty support when they had installed Linux. We stood there and went through every piece of paper that came with the new computer, and no-where was this written down. But
when we called Compaq/HP customer service, the
woman with the Indian accent eventually verified
that this was true. According to her it violates
the HARDWARE warranty to even repartition the hard
drive. For the pedantics out there, yes, it is
possible to get a Linux installation without
repartitioning the hard drive, and from what I
could tell from their representative this would
still make them cry foul about the hardware
warranty, but how do I know for sure? It isn't in writing anywhere.
For the record, this took place about 8 months ago. I ended up buying a Compaq laptop from them
anyway and installing Linux, but I usually run
Windows XP anyway. (Why? Mainly because I couldn't get Linux to do suspend or power management, and the first time the laptop hard-
crashed by running completely out of battery I
said I'm never going to do that again because
that really will destroy a battery fast, which
means never using it on the battery under Linux
to be safe...)
I've seen several reasons cited above why Microsoft works so hard to keep clients like the Munich government:
Like a crack dealer -- willing to give things cheap now to get you hooked
They don't want the PR black eye of being rated below Linux
Governments set standards for things like documents that are used by everyone
Here's another reason: open source users are (often) developers, causing a snowball effect in the quality of the product.
Figure 14,000 computers at maybe 100 computers per competent sysadmin. That gives 140 new jobs to Linux sysadmins. Figure maybe one in ten Linux administrators will contribute to coding/bug fixing/documenting products. Poof -- 14 new developers. Not to mention all the other admins and users contributing general knowledge.
So what does huge Microsoft fear from a few more coders? The thing about the free software movement is that it has a history of producing Davids to the industries Goliaths.
Let me quote from this article by the former chief financial officer of the postal service, describing the proposal that set our current postal rates:
Discounts should be set between 80 percent and 100 percent of the costs the Postal Service avoids when large mailers pre-sort their mail, he said, but never more than the "costs avoided." The Postal Service acknowledges that the discounts are greater than the costs avoided under their proposal.
Now if you actually can cite a law saying classes of mail do not subsidize each other, that would be interesting...
you pay for bulk (snail) mail too
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the case of bulk snail mail, 100% of the costs (if you don't include me physically picking up the mail, looking at it, and tearing the latest "Want a 0% interest credit card that jumps to 30% later?" envelope as cost) is payed by the sender.
This is a common misconception. If you use the postal service to send letters with actual first class stamps on them, you are paying for bulk mail to be sent. Why? Because the postal service charges bulk mailers less than cost to send their junk to your mailbox. They make up for it with higher rates for first class customers.
See for instance this statement from the former chief financial officer of the postal service.
Aha, now we're descending from the general case to a specific case. And in this specific case, you're quite right: the "window-close" widget in just about every WIMP interface out there takes forever and a day (relatively speaking) to get a lock on. The metaphor has stuck with us primarily because nobody's thought of a better method yet.
Here's a suggestion: remove the one-to-one tie between screen geometry and mousespace geometry. Just because the "window-close" widget is conveniently small in visual size, it doesn't have to be hard to hit with a mouse. Mousespace geometry could have this and other widgets emphasized, so your mouse movement slows down as you swoop by, and is easier to move in that direction. (For the visually-minded, imagine a screen where a magnifying distortion has been applied in the vicinity of each mouse-interesting object.) This is how your mouse should see distance, with boring space around a widget shrunken and the widget target expanded...
Has anyone stopped to notice how much restraint the worm writer is
showing? Think a second. The person writing this thing was not an idiot.
It required serious technical skills and probably a large investment of
time and energy. Anyone who says "Oh, the worm author was so stupid for
using a hard-coded IP addresss for whitehouse.gov" or "They must have been
dumb to forget to seed their random number generator" is not looking
carefully. The worm has always been carefully, purposefully shackled
by its creator not to do too much harm. Did you read the
eEye analysis?
Or the
CAIDA or Staniford
stastical studies of the worm's spread? Some facts:
The first version of the worm appeared on July 13 or so.
It had an unseeded random number
generator, so the IP's it scanned were a fixed sequence -- BUT it
contained the code to seed the random number generator; this code
was disabled.(*)
Its DoS attack was set to bomb a particular fixed IP address, AND
not even send the bomb packets if that IP could not be reached
It contained code to deface web pages served making its presence
very visable well before the bombing attack was scheduled to take
place
It contained code to deactivate its spread if a particular
file (c:\notworm) was present.
It contained code to deactivate its spread after the "attack phase"
began
On July 19, a second version was introduced.
The second version re-enabled the random number generating
seed but was otherwise no less shackled than the first version.
This version spread exponentially, with growth finally being
limited by the number of susceptible servers connected to the internet and
the fact that it reached the time of the "attack phase"
This version infected over 359,000 hosts in under 14 hours.
(*)I read this somewhere but can't relocate that source right now. The
rest of the info comes directly from the sources linked above.
The point? The worm author has carefully controlled the attack to
cause alarm but not do real damage. When the initial version failed to
cause serious alarm, it was loosened slightly from its shackles but still
extremely restrained. More to the point? If the worm author -- or
anyone else among the thousands with the technical skills to do so --
chose to, they could DoS basically the whole internet. According
to netsizer.com, there are about 121 million
internet hosts right now, so that gives a ratio of 1 infected computer to
300 hosts. That sounds like too small of a ratio to DoS all of them, but
remember to shut things down all that has to happen is to saturate
bandwidth, not overload servers. The only reason we're using the net
happily today is that the worm author and others with those skills
choose to restrain themselves.
From one of the articles describing this research:
The unusual property of this new class of materials is essentially its ability to reverse
many of the physical properties that govern the behavior of ordinary materials.
...
This is because Snell's law, which describes the angle of refraction caused by the change in velocity of light and other waves through lenses, water and other types of ordinary material, is expected to be exactly opposite within this composite.
...
Underlying the reversal of the Doppler effect, Snell's law, and Cerenkov radiation (radiation by charged particles moving through a medium) is that this new material exhibits a reversal of one of the "right-hand rules" of physics which describe a
relationship between the electric and magnetic fields and the direction of their wave velocity.
The new materials are known by the UCSD team colloquially as "left-handed materials," after a term coined by Veselago, because they reverse this relationship.
...
What's unusual about the new class of materials produced by the UCSD team is that it simultaneously has a negative electric permittivity and a negative magnetic permeability, a combination of properties never before seen in a natural or man-made material.
Think of the file system as a database, yes, but think of the files not as records but as objects in the sense of object-oriented programming. A file is an instance of a particular class of object [*]. Associated with that class are various methods (e.g. associated with an HTML file are methods to view this with netscape, or edit it in my favorite raw text editor, or edit it with my favorite HTML composer, etc.; associated to an executable file is the execution of it.). There is a hierarchy of classes with inheritance (the class of HTML files is a subclass of PLAINTEXT files).
[*] really the class has other data structures besides the actual file data: e.g. file name, a field for comments about the file, etc., which may vary from class to class
There are also a variety of classes which serve as containers. The most obvious are what traditionally are directories or desktops. Another container class is "query", which has typical database search methods associated. These can be saved, copied, etc.
Imagine this: your command line should not be associated with a particular directory location, but rather a particular query. On the command line you most frequently use "cq" ("change query"), "rq" ("restrict query"), and "eq" ("expand query"). So to view the penguin image I know lurks somewhere on my drive, the sequence would be something like
% cq type=image
5037 files selected
% rq *pengiun*
2 files selected
% ls
pengiun_57.jpg
pengiun.gif
%./penguin.gif
No default action for type "gif"; performing default action for type "image": opening penguin.gif with gimp...
(And, of course, there are obvious database sorts of features that any sensible graphical file explorer should have...)
To summarize:
(1) YES!!! Regardless of how exactly the system implements it, the filesystem should be interfaced as a database.
(2) Furthermore, don't view files just as RECORDS -- view them as active OBJECTS that are instances within a hierarchical class structure.
Finally, I think a lot of this can be done just with user interface, without having it explicitly in the filesystem. In fact, things have definately been moving this direction, at least for graphical file explorers. Has anyone added this sort of thing to a command shell?
This feature would be wonderful! (I'm a gnome user, and hate it when my taskbar gets full of netscapes and I have to guess which one to click on...) I don't know exactly how Whistler impliments it (or what the KDE discussionants thought) but I'd guess that when you click that taskbar selection it gives you a list -- wide enough you can read the actual page titles (window titles) of the entries so that you can select the one you want. This means I can unambigously get the right choice in two clicks instead of having to try randomly to get the right choice averaging n/2 clicks (where n is the number of netscape windows open). This is an advantage for n>2 when the number of taskbar entries is sufficiently large that no significant portion of the page titles is displayed.
I think a lot of UI design can be reduced to the following: (1) make sure there is an easy strategy to get the right result (2) design the UI to minimize the number of steps to carry out that strategy.
Here is an example of Microsoft doing a good thing and carrying out (2).
Slashdot Mirror
I think its more likely that the sheer brilliance of his work earns Perelman the respect of others in the field. I've been to a couple of talks by people who had spent months wading through Perelman's papers. Their opinion was that regardless of whether or not some error was found preventing the work from being a full proof of the Poincare conjecture, the research was undoubtedly brilliant and would greatly advance the field.
There are plenty of arrogant bastards in mathematics who still earn lots of respect for their work. Perelman goes a step farther and, with his humility, earns some admiration as a person as well. At least from those of us who are watching the process at some distance...
So the next thing you might consider is a program which doesn't depend that much on the hardware details, but uses a well-defined interface between its execution and the hardware. This "well-defined interface" is precisely what a modern operating system provides. This next level of abstraction means that you don't have to anticipate exact emulation of hardware, just emulation of hardware sufficient to run the OS and also provision of drivers for the OS to interface with either emulated or physical hardware (like video cards, disk drives, etc.) This potentially requires a lot of things to be updated in a nontrivial way for even small changes in the host platform, not very good.
I would suggest the best way to get software that could be run for 200+ years is for it to be written for a particular virtual machine. The code for both the software and the virtual machine should be open source (so long-term portable and fixable), and the virtual machine should be very well-defined and not subject to version changing. The virtual machine software should also be cross-platform today so it is easier to port to tomorrows platforms. Java is close to the right idea, but it doesn't have a single virtual machine well-enough defined across various implementations and versions, nor is it open source.
So why is it better to have a virtual machine written in say C which has to be ported to each new hardware/OS combination rather than having the base application written in C and ported to each new hardware/OS combination? The economy of scale. The virtual machine should have many users who will participate in the port and check for bugs. Then each coroporation/municipality/whoever who wants to run long-term stable code doesn't have to do this porting for themselves. For software which uses minimal I/O (no graphics whatsoever, only stdin/stdout) it probably would make more sense to keep the software in C and port it. But otherwise I/O isn't standard enough without a virtual machine...
For me its no@thanks.com :^) Thought I'd be polite about it at least.
This whole thread is completely degenerating into speculation and useless theorizing. To be more concrete, I've read dozens of articles on wikipedia and have yet to read anything Just Plain Wrong or trollishly biased. Yes, I hear you say, you're just a random slashdot reader who probably doesn't know anything anyway. I challenge YOU to find anything blatently false or biased on wikipedia. To make it fair, lets rule out anything that has been there less than 24 hours (and so hasn't had much time for review). Post links here. Go on.
- In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings,'' he says.
So the "father of the DVD" is predicting its demise. ("Father" is maybe less appropriate than "midwife" -- he didn't invent anything, he just convinced the industry bigwigs to adopt it...)There is a natural tendency for a dominant piece of software to stabilise ("ossify"), at which point it will head towards being a commodity item. This is the process by which a closed-source program will be overtaken by open source clones, a process which O'reilly sees taking place with, for instance, Microsoft Office.
Open source software is a natural process (yes, think process as opposed to artifact!) which takes place as a collaboration. The "winners" that the parent poster mentions are places where the collaborative process occurs freely and naturally, as opposed to the losing places where the collaboration is forced or stifled. Pretty much everything that is good about the internet comes from such open collaborative process (think the RFC process that brough TCP/IP, uucp, smtp, ftp, http/html, and so on, as well as many of the programs using those protocols).
The place for businesses to make money in the open source process is in customization -- putting together all of the pieces in the way the customer wants at the time the customer needs it. This is providing a service, rather than just a product.
There is a secondary thrust of the article as well, which I think is more interesting than what is highlighted above. O'Reilly points out that there is an increasing movement of important software from the desktop to the network. The old paradigm is that people used a computer to run programs. But things like google and amazon.com don't fit that paradigm. You don't run google, or run amazon.com. You use them, over the network. There is a big opening here, waiting for someone to come up with a better set of tools to bridge the gap that distinguishes between running programs locally and using programs on the network. Tim O'Reilly describes this missing set of tools as an "internet operating system," and characterises this as the "one ring to rule them all" for whomever most successfully fills that gap. He doesn't say it explicitly, but I think this is what Microsoft is aiming for with .net. In the coming years this war of the ring will certainly develop; how it goes remains to be seen...
One of the best spreadsheets for linux, gnumeric has support for 100% of Excel's functions as well as most of its other features. Its one of the highest quality and most stable pieces of software I've ever seen for linux. Its amazing they overlooked this as competition.
Do you expect WINE and Mono to move closer together or merge into one project when the next Windows OS ships with .NET as an integral part?
The other course was a physics course, which used as a textbook a CD-ROM containing digitised copies of several physics references. That was far worse than just having a textbook. Exactly the same content, with a poorly implemented interface.
I have a lot of trouble imagining any quality course content suddenly appearing for these laptop-toting middle schoolers. I'd be willing to bet that what they get are poorly done conversions of physical textbooks, especially given the apathetic state of the textbook industry with respect to content. Most likely the laptops will only hinder education in the targetted subject areas.
- Has IBM actually used its patent against anyone, or did they just get it in self-defence?
The IBM patent in question is number 4814746 and covers some variations of the LZW compression algorithm, including (apparantly) the variation used in GIF images. Interestingly, though this patent was granted after the UNISYS patent (and so expires later than the UNISYS patent did) the IBM filing was earlier by a matter of days so they've got a reasonable claim of priority. The claims these patents make (apparantly) overlap with both covering the GIF image compression algorithm.One of IBM's counter-claims against SCO in that circus of a lawsuit is that SCO infringes this very patent. See this thread on Groklaw. I don't know if they've had other legal disputes over the patent.
- Comments on suggested representatives:
How about trying to finally get usable clipboard support for the desktops? Maybe with the KDE and Gnome guys actually working on X (or with X developers) this increadible cluster-f*** can be made more sane. Not to mention asking for functional drag-and-drop.KDE - Why? They only deal with QT, not X. Trolltech might be a good choice.
Gnome - Why? They only deal with GTK, not X. Maybe you mean the GTK devs.
More info on the clipboard mess here.
- Haydn Fenton wrote:
- However, since firefox has a built in 'google function' as I call it (this works by typing google [searchtopic] in the address bar and hitting enter) I must use it around 10 to 20 times a day.
You've just illustrated exactly why Microsoft search will suddenly become very popular in 2005/2006 -- whenever they make it the default method of search in the default browser/file explorer/task bar installed on 90+ percent of the desktops of all computer users. It will be right there in front of users, and probably next to impossible to configure the search tool to use anything else (like google). So, just like you, the majority of users will use the 'search function' in front of them. Which will be Microsoft search. Funny how that works...this
update article at the Washington Post.
I guess disabled really means that.
Here's betting nobody makes it past them...
Your thought ("WTF!?") was right on target. I don't know what you actually did, but it clearly wasn't XOR the audio file with anything resembling random bits. If you XOR a message with truly random bits, the result will consist of truly random bits. This is because for each bit of message there is a 50-50 chance that you will flip that bit, and these chances are all independent. So the output bit has a 50-50 chance of being 0 or 1, independent of other output bits.
The same general principle applies when you XOR a message with pseudo-random bits. Provided the original message had no built-in correlation to the pseudo-random bit stream, the output will have as good random characteristics as the pseudo-random bit stream. In particular, it will sound like white noise when you feed it to a speaker.
Contrast this with what would happen if you AND or OR the message with a (pseudo-)random bit stream. In this case each bit has a 50-50 chance of being left unchanged and a 50-50 chance of being set to zero (AND) or one (OR). This would produce an output like you describe; it would sound like a noisy version of the original file. If I had to guess, this is what you actually did.
The same is true for Compaq, at least their laptops marketed through Circuit City. The salesperson let me know this when I asked him if he knew anything about how well the hardware was supported under Linux. He said that some other customers had had trouble getting under-warranty support when they had installed Linux. We stood there and went through every piece of paper that came with the new computer, and no-where was this written down. But when we called Compaq/HP customer service, the woman with the Indian accent eventually verified that this was true. According to her it violates the HARDWARE warranty to even repartition the hard drive. For the pedantics out there, yes, it is possible to get a Linux installation without repartitioning the hard drive, and from what I could tell from their representative this would still make them cry foul about the hardware warranty, but how do I know for sure? It isn't in writing anywhere.
For the record, this took place about 8 months ago. I ended up buying a Compaq laptop from them anyway and installing Linux, but I usually run Windows XP anyway. (Why? Mainly because I couldn't get Linux to do suspend or power management, and the first time the laptop hard- crashed by running completely out of battery I said I'm never going to do that again because that really will destroy a battery fast, which means never using it on the battery under Linux to be safe...)
Ah, but have you noticed the scores still sort properly in the 32k to 64k range? They just display as a signed int...
(Unfortunately I still haven't been able to wrap all the way back around past 64K; my top was at ~50k back when I was addicted)
--Travis
- Like a crack dealer -- willing to give things cheap now to get you hooked
- They don't want the PR black eye of being rated below Linux
- Governments set standards for things like documents that are used by everyone
Here's another reason: open source users are (often) developers, causing a snowball effect in the quality of the product.Figure 14,000 computers at maybe 100 computers per competent sysadmin. That gives 140 new jobs to Linux sysadmins. Figure maybe one in ten Linux administrators will contribute to coding/bug fixing/documenting products. Poof -- 14 new developers. Not to mention all the other admins and users contributing general knowledge.
So what does huge Microsoft fear from a few more coders? The thing about the free software movement is that it has a history of producing Davids to the industries Goliaths.
- Discounts should be set between 80 percent and 100 percent of the costs the Postal Service avoids when large mailers pre-sort their mail, he said, but never more than the "costs avoided." The Postal Service acknowledges that the discounts are greater than the costs avoided under their proposal.
Now if you actually can cite a law saying classes of mail do not subsidize each other, that would be interesting...- In the case of bulk snail mail, 100% of the costs (if you don't include me physically picking up the mail, looking at it, and tearing the latest "Want a 0% interest credit card that jumps to 30% later?" envelope as cost) is payed by the sender.
This is a common misconception. If you use the postal service to send letters with actual first class stamps on them, you are paying for bulk mail to be sent. Why? Because the postal service charges bulk mailers less than cost to send their junk to your mailbox. They make up for it with higher rates for first class customers.See for instance this statement from the former chief financial officer of the postal service.
- The first version of the worm appeared on July 13 or so.
- It had an unseeded random number
generator, so the IP's it scanned were a fixed sequence -- BUT it
contained the code to seed the random number generator; this code
was disabled.(*)
- Its DoS attack was set to bomb a particular fixed IP address, AND
not even send the bomb packets if that IP could not be reached
- It contained code to deface web pages served making its presence
very visable well before the bombing attack was scheduled to take
place
- It contained code to deactivate its spread if a particular
file (c:\notworm) was present.
- It contained code to deactivate its spread after the "attack phase"
began
- On July 19, a second version was introduced.
- The second version re-enabled the random number generating
seed but was otherwise no less shackled than the first version.
- This version spread exponentially, with growth finally being
limited by the number of susceptible servers connected to the internet and
the fact that it reached the time of the "attack phase"
- This version infected over 359,000 hosts in under 14 hours.
(*)I read this somewhere but can't relocate that source right now. The rest of the info comes directly from the sources linked above.The point? The worm author has carefully controlled the attack to cause alarm but not do real damage. When the initial version failed to cause serious alarm, it was loosened slightly from its shackles but still extremely restrained. More to the point? If the worm author -- or anyone else among the thousands with the technical skills to do so -- chose to, they could DoS basically the whole internet. According to netsizer.com, there are about 121 million internet hosts right now, so that gives a ratio of 1 infected computer to 300 hosts. That sounds like too small of a ratio to DoS all of them, but remember to shut things down all that has to happen is to saturate bandwidth, not overload servers. The only reason we're using the net happily today is that the worm author and others with those skills choose to restrain themselves.
[*] really the class has other data structures besides the actual file data: e.g. file name, a field for comments about the file, etc., which may vary from class to class
There are also a variety of classes which serve as containers. The most obvious are what traditionally are directories or desktops. Another container class is "query", which has typical database search methods associated. These can be saved, copied, etc.
Imagine this: your command line should not be associated with a particular directory location, but rather a particular query. On the command line you most frequently use "cq" ("change query"), "rq" ("restrict query"), and "eq" ("expand query"). So to view the penguin image I know lurks somewhere on my drive, the sequence would be something like
% cq type=image ./penguin.gif
5037 files selected
% rq *pengiun*
2 files selected
% ls
pengiun_57.jpg
pengiun.gif
%
No default action for type "gif"; performing default action for type "image": opening penguin.gif with gimp...
(And, of course, there are obvious database sorts of features that any sensible graphical file explorer should have...)
To summarize:
(1) YES!!! Regardless of how exactly the system implements it, the filesystem should be interfaced as a database.
(2) Furthermore, don't view files just as RECORDS -- view them as active OBJECTS that are instances within a hierarchical class structure.
Finally, I think a lot of this can be done just with user interface, without having it explicitly in the filesystem. In fact, things have definately been moving this direction, at least for graphical file explorers. Has anyone added this sort of thing to a command shell?
This feature would be wonderful! (I'm a gnome user, and hate it when my taskbar gets full of netscapes and I have to guess which one to click on...) I don't know exactly how Whistler impliments it (or what the KDE discussionants thought) but I'd guess that when you click that taskbar selection it gives you a list -- wide enough you can read the actual page titles (window titles) of the entries so that you can select the one you want. This means I can unambigously get the right choice in two clicks instead of having to try randomly to get the right choice averaging n/2 clicks (where n is the number of netscape windows open). This is an advantage for n>2 when the number of taskbar entries is sufficiently large that no significant portion of the page titles is displayed. I think a lot of UI design can be reduced to the following: (1) make sure there is an easy strategy to get the right result (2) design the UI to minimize the number of steps to carry out that strategy. Here is an example of Microsoft doing a good thing and carrying out (2).