I don't understand what the kernel has to do with any of this. Fat binaries can be (almost) completely implemented at the userspace level by extending the dynamic loader (ld-linux.so). The way this would work is that the fat binary would have a boilerplate ELF header that contains just enough information to convince the kernel to load it and launch its interpreter program, which could piggyback on the standard dynamic loader. The fat binary interpretter would locate the correct architecture within the fat binary, map its ELF header into memory, then call out to the regular dynamic loader to finish the job. The only hitch is that a 64-bit kernel will refuse to load a 32-bit ELF, and vice-versa, so you would need an EXTREMELY minor patch to the kernel to allow it to happen. I mean like a one-liner.
This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.
Interesting viewpoint. I used to develop document viewing and imaging software at a small company with a fairly specialized user base. One of the mantras we followed was that a user-facing optimization was not worth it unless it improved performance by at least 400%. This was empirically determined through unsolicited user feedback (they never commented when we doubled the speed of something) and direct polling of the user base. Point being, the product was already fast enough. But that's a far cry from web development, which I admit I've never done (and won't, if I get my way)
I think it's kind of depressing that a 30% speed increase in JavaScript processing is actually something which is interesting to talk about. Are web pages seriously doing that much fucking JavaScript that it's even PERCEPTIBLE to the user? That making it 30% faster actually makes somebody's day suck a little less? That's sad. Sad, sad, sad.
* they advertise how customers will need to do nothing for the digital conversion. then we get boxes
Not that I love Comcast or anything, but they advertised that in my area as well, and it was the truth. The digital switch came and went, I received no box to install or hook up, I literally did nothing. My cable TV still works fine.
It's possible that in some areas, a conversion box was required. Maybe you saw an advertisement intended for a different zone of customers. It's still false advertising, but don't ascribe to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence.
I'd be really surprised by any mortgage written in the last twenty years that doesn't require having major modifications to the dwelling signed off by the bank.
Yes, I do have such a clause in my mortgage terms, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Obviously the bank doesn't want you to decrease the value of their collateral. But a homeowner does NOT need to ask permission to do basic home repair. In an apartment I used to live in, I had to get permission to install a new showerhead in the bathroom.
Something like adding a second floor is a totally different matter (and really, all the bank cares about is that the contractor has appropriate insurance in case they damage the house).
Not really. First, the most it could do is infect your own files, not the system.
Because we all know that the system files, which are included on my installation CD and can be restored at any time, are the ones I really need to protect. Right?
Suppose you can tolerate a chance of collision of 10^-18 per-block. Given a 256-bit hash, it would take 4.8e29 blocks to achieve this collision probability. Supposing a block size of 512 bytes, that's 223517417907714843750 terabytes.
Now, supposing you have a 223517417907714843750 terabyte drive, and you can NOT tolerate a collision probability of 10^-18, then you can just do a bit-for-bit check of the colliding blocks before deciding if they are identical or not.
The bank does not own your house. If somebody slips on your front driveway, who is liable? Who pays the property tax? When's the last time you asked your bank for permission before doing home improvements? When's the last time an officer of the bank came into your home because hey, it's his property?
Because it's not Ubuntu, it's an off-the-shelf commercial operating system and should be expected to work out of the box. Why would anyone be expected to serve as unpaid beta testers for a product that they bought?
Why would anybody expect software, commercially produced or not, to function flawlessly on billions of systems without the slightest defect? Yes, MS should be held to quality standards as much as any other company. I don't know what companies you do business with, but I don't know any who produce perfect products.
If Wallace is taken out and shot he'll lose about 365*50*24= 438,000 life hours. On the other hand, even a year or two of Wallace's normal behavior causes the rest of society to lose far more time.
We're losing time, but we're not dying. Wallace can lose his 438,000 hours behind bars. I seriously don't know what's with some geeks who seem to get so upset about antisocial behavior on the Internet that they seriously suggest things like the death penalty for non-violent offenses. Honestly, this kind of attitude is terrifying and something other (normal) people really need to be aware of and actively speak out against.
If everybody followed this advice, there would be nobody using Windows 7, and therefore nobody would be uncovering issues, and therefore no service pack would be released. The quickest way to find and fix problems is for everybody to use the thing and report what's broken.
I wasn't there to see it. I'm not saying all collisions are inexcusable, but when driving in icy conditions I typically stop a good ten feet back from the intersection to minimize the risk of exactly what happened to you.
I'm talking about the ideal "good driver." None of us meet that ideal, including me. I just don't like the excuse "but it was the other guy's fault." Most things are avoidable (and in the extreme, avoidable by choosing not to drive on a particular roadway).
I don't know - at least 30% of the daily ass-hattery I see comes from motorcycle riders... like the dumbass I saw this morning doing a wheelie down an on-ramp, or the numerous riders every day that seem to think that if traffic slows down more then 10 mph below their desired speed then they should go riding between the lanes of traffic.
Riding between lanes ("lane splitting") is actually the norm in most parts of the world, and legal in California. From my experience, it's not a particularly dangerous thing, as long as drivers are expecting it. I've only ever seen it done in very heavy traffic at slow speeds. If you've seen people doing it at highway speeds, well, that's just craziness.
A good driver avoids most accidents even if they are caused by another driver's lack of control. I can't tell you how many times I've anticipated a dumbass move by some driver, pedestrian, or cyclist and preempted a collision.
You talk about "superior control" over the vehicle as if that's the hard part. That hard part is all the other people on the road. A good driver doesn't collide with things, period.
I know a guy who used to work at HP. He was an ink chemist, although not personally responsible for the prices you pay;-) He's a diehard electronics hobbyist, and he's been printing his own boards this way for several years now. I've seen some of his boards, and they seem to be very durable. And this was with an inkjet printer he hacked himself, with home-made ink (he won't tell me what's in it)
Let's not get all full of ourselves here. We might go way back, but to say that the majority of Slashdotters were online BEFORE Geocities is probably stretching it. I was on the Internet before 1995, and I don't think of Geocities as a "n00b thing." 14 years ago isn't exactly a blink of the eye.
That's just a cop out. Quality software can be written for any platform provided the developer puts in the effort to make a quality product.
If you think the relative quality difference is because of anything that any DEVELOPER did, you're an idiot. The kind of developer who works at Apple, the kind of developer who works at Microsoft, these people don't release a piece of shit out of laziness, they release a piece of shit because of management and corporate priorities.
You can put together the best team of programmers in the world, but if "Making product X work well on playform Y" is literally the last thing on their list of priorities, guess what's going to happen? Another fun fact for you: the developers aren't the guys setting the priorities and saying when it's good enough or not good enough.
Blaming the developer just proves you have no idea how software development actually happens.
Radiation nucleates droplets in clouds so that water vapor precipitates where it otherwise would have stayed in the atmosphere. Its a bit like how dust from outer space contributes to rainfall by encouraging the formation of drops big enough to fall as rain.
It can certainly induce local rainfall, but neglecting a feedback effect, it can't make the entire planet "rainier" because there is no increased input of water vapor to the atmosphere.
How about cloud cover leads to more precipitation?
No. Precipitation cannot be larger than evaporation. Evaporation is heat driven, and cosmic rays do not input enough heat energy to significantly contribute to evaporation.
No, I'm not dense. Mutation is a separate effect. Inbreeding may help a recessive, mutated gene to express itself. But it did not CREATE the mutated gene.
In a mutation-free, perfect genome, inbreeding would have absolutely no detrimental effects. The two things interplay with each other, but one does not CAUSE the other.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand what the kernel has to do with any of this. Fat binaries can be (almost) completely implemented at the userspace level by extending the dynamic loader (ld-linux.so). The way this would work is that the fat binary would have a boilerplate ELF header that contains just enough information to convince the kernel to load it and launch its interpreter program, which could piggyback on the standard dynamic loader. The fat binary interpretter would locate the correct architecture within the fat binary, map its ELF header into memory, then call out to the regular dynamic loader to finish the job. The only hitch is that a 64-bit kernel will refuse to load a 32-bit ELF, and vice-versa, so you would need an EXTREMELY minor patch to the kernel to allow it to happen. I mean like a one-liner.
This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.
Interesting viewpoint. I used to develop document viewing and imaging software at a small company with a fairly specialized user base. One of the mantras we followed was that a user-facing optimization was not worth it unless it improved performance by at least 400%. This was empirically determined through unsolicited user feedback (they never commented when we doubled the speed of something) and direct polling of the user base. Point being, the product was already fast enough. But that's a far cry from web development, which I admit I've never done (and won't, if I get my way)
That isn't something I've noticed here, and I'm curious as to what your experimental method was in determining that (seriously, not sarcastic)
I think it's kind of depressing that a 30% speed increase in JavaScript processing is actually something which is interesting to talk about. Are web pages seriously doing that much fucking JavaScript that it's even PERCEPTIBLE to the user? That making it 30% faster actually makes somebody's day suck a little less? That's sad. Sad, sad, sad.
* they advertise how customers will need to do nothing for the digital conversion. then we get boxes
Not that I love Comcast or anything, but they advertised that in my area as well, and it was the truth. The digital switch came and went, I received no box to install or hook up, I literally did nothing. My cable TV still works fine.
It's possible that in some areas, a conversion box was required. Maybe you saw an advertisement intended for a different zone of customers. It's still false advertising, but don't ascribe to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence.
I'd be really surprised by any mortgage written in the last twenty years that doesn't require having major modifications to the dwelling signed off by the bank.
Yes, I do have such a clause in my mortgage terms, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Obviously the bank doesn't want you to decrease the value of their collateral. But a homeowner does NOT need to ask permission to do basic home repair. In an apartment I used to live in, I had to get permission to install a new showerhead in the bathroom.
Something like adding a second floor is a totally different matter (and really, all the bank cares about is that the contractor has appropriate insurance in case they damage the house).
Not really. First, the most it could do is infect your own files, not the system.
Because we all know that the system files, which are included on my installation CD and can be restored at any time, are the ones I really need to protect. Right?
Are you suggesting that the general data corruption rate of a modern disk is lower than 10^-18? I wonder where you find these magical drives.
Oops. I didn't mean 10^-18 per-block, I meant 10^-18 for the entire filesystem. (Obviously it doesn't make sense the other way)
Suppose you can tolerate a chance of collision of 10^-18 per-block. Given a 256-bit hash, it would take 4.8e29 blocks to achieve this collision probability. Supposing a block size of 512 bytes, that's 223517417907714843750 terabytes.
Now, supposing you have a 223517417907714843750 terabyte drive, and you can NOT tolerate a collision probability of 10^-18, then you can just do a bit-for-bit check of the colliding blocks before deciding if they are identical or not.
The bank does not own your house. If somebody slips on your front driveway, who is liable? Who pays the property tax? When's the last time you asked your bank for permission before doing home improvements? When's the last time an officer of the bank came into your home because hey, it's his property?
Because it's not Ubuntu, it's an off-the-shelf commercial operating system and should be expected to work out of the box. Why would anyone be expected to serve as unpaid beta testers for a product that they bought?
Why would anybody expect software, commercially produced or not, to function flawlessly on billions of systems without the slightest defect? Yes, MS should be held to quality standards as much as any other company. I don't know what companies you do business with, but I don't know any who produce perfect products.
If Wallace is taken out and shot he'll lose about 365*50*24= 438,000 life hours. On the other hand, even a year or two of Wallace's normal behavior causes the rest of society to lose far more time.
We're losing time, but we're not dying. Wallace can lose his 438,000 hours behind bars. I seriously don't know what's with some geeks who seem to get so upset about antisocial behavior on the Internet that they seriously suggest things like the death penalty for non-violent offenses. Honestly, this kind of attitude is terrifying and something other (normal) people really need to be aware of and actively speak out against.
If everybody followed this advice, there would be nobody using Windows 7, and therefore nobody would be uncovering issues, and therefore no service pack would be released. The quickest way to find and fix problems is for everybody to use the thing and report what's broken.
I wasn't there to see it. I'm not saying all collisions are inexcusable, but when driving in icy conditions I typically stop a good ten feet back from the intersection to minimize the risk of exactly what happened to you.
I'm talking about the ideal "good driver." None of us meet that ideal, including me. I just don't like the excuse "but it was the other guy's fault." Most things are avoidable (and in the extreme, avoidable by choosing not to drive on a particular roadway).
I don't know - at least 30% of the daily ass-hattery I see comes from motorcycle riders... like the dumbass I saw this morning doing a wheelie down an on-ramp, or the numerous riders every day that seem to think that if traffic slows down more then 10 mph below their desired speed then they should go riding between the lanes of traffic.
Riding between lanes ("lane splitting") is actually the norm in most parts of the world, and legal in California. From my experience, it's not a particularly dangerous thing, as long as drivers are expecting it. I've only ever seen it done in very heavy traffic at slow speeds. If you've seen people doing it at highway speeds, well, that's just craziness.
A good driver avoids most accidents even if they are caused by another driver's lack of control. I can't tell you how many times I've anticipated a dumbass move by some driver, pedestrian, or cyclist and preempted a collision.
You talk about "superior control" over the vehicle as if that's the hard part. That hard part is all the other people on the road. A good driver doesn't collide with things, period.
I know a guy who used to work at HP. He was an ink chemist, although not personally responsible for the prices you pay ;-) He's a diehard electronics hobbyist, and he's been printing his own boards this way for several years now. I've seen some of his boards, and they seem to be very durable. And this was with an inkjet printer he hacked himself, with home-made ink (he won't tell me what's in it)
Let's not get all full of ourselves here. We might go way back, but to say that the majority of Slashdotters were online BEFORE Geocities is probably stretching it. I was on the Internet before 1995, and I don't think of Geocities as a "n00b thing." 14 years ago isn't exactly a blink of the eye.
That's just a cop out. Quality software can be written for any platform provided the developer puts in the effort to make a quality product.
If you think the relative quality difference is because of anything that any DEVELOPER did, you're an idiot. The kind of developer who works at Apple, the kind of developer who works at Microsoft, these people don't release a piece of shit out of laziness, they release a piece of shit because of management and corporate priorities.
You can put together the best team of programmers in the world, but if "Making product X work well on playform Y" is literally the last thing on their list of priorities, guess what's going to happen? Another fun fact for you: the developers aren't the guys setting the priorities and saying when it's good enough or not good enough.
Blaming the developer just proves you have no idea how software development actually happens.
Radiation nucleates droplets in clouds so that water vapor precipitates where it otherwise would have stayed in the atmosphere. Its a bit like how dust from outer space contributes to rainfall by encouraging the formation of drops big enough to fall as rain.
It can certainly induce local rainfall, but neglecting a feedback effect, it can't make the entire planet "rainier" because there is no increased input of water vapor to the atmosphere.
How about cloud cover leads to more precipitation?
No. Precipitation cannot be larger than evaporation. Evaporation is heat driven, and cosmic rays do not input enough heat energy to significantly contribute to evaporation.
No, I'm not dense. Mutation is a separate effect. Inbreeding may help a recessive, mutated gene to express itself. But it did not CREATE the mutated gene.
In a mutation-free, perfect genome, inbreeding would have absolutely no detrimental effects. The two things interplay with each other, but one does not CAUSE the other.
Wikipedia: The term was coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe.
What the hell does inbreeding have to do with MUTATION rate?