I once wrote a (very complicated) spreadsheet in Excel to calculate bonuses for drug peddlers at a pharmaceutical company. The problem screamed for a database, but the algorithm for calculating the bonuses was so complicated that it as a royal pain in the ass when I tried it. So I ended up with a fugly spreadsheet that still works 5 years on.
The ridiculous thing was that it could've all been well approximated with an exponential function, but that idea was a big no-no. The bonus algorithm is sacred.
In (mathematics) open-book exams I've taken, the books were essential. The highest scored solutions consisted of recognizing the problem, butchering equations for a few lines, and then pointing to the correct page in the correct book. The people who got highest grades were done in 15 minutes, though you were allowed to sit for at least 3 hours.
But, of course, to do that, you had to actually understand what it was all about, and you certainly couldn't learn that in 3 hours with all the books in the world.
If you are born without a tongue the government doesn't pay for the surgery to make one. If your tongue gets cut off the government doesn't foot the bill to sew it back on.
That depends on where you live.
Re:$20,000 for a low-traffic database server?
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
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· Score: 0
What you are seeing now is cached static copies of articles that are normally generated on the fly (turns out rendering of wikicode is not a bottleneck in the whole thing plus rendering of pages needs to be at least partly dynamic for several reasons).
The two web servers serve pages from the database server, which is where all data is, so if that croaks, the whole thing croaks.
Running a huge mult-language encyclopaedia with complete revision history for all pages, proper interlinking and redirecting of pages, discussion about articles, daily discussion, etc. is not a small thing.
The site is just way too big (traffic on par with slashdot.org or sun.com, database size 35 MB) to be run on creaky machines. It needs proper hardware.
while i do agree that poverty is not the main reason why people get into dealing dope, it's one of the main reasons why they start using serious stuff - when your life sucks and you have no way of making it better, it certainly makes sense to get high to feel good for at least a while. so eliminating poverty (whatever that means) would help the real problems.
I'm wonderig... What happens if you go to sleep or pass out? Does your consciousness die and when you wake up you have a new consciousness which is the copy of the one before?
err... this guy is not a millionaire. He's not even rich. Everything was paid for by sponsors and some by the state (simobil.si is a cel phone operator).
I wonder how much money and how many people risk thier lives to go rescue these idiots when they get lost/break a leg/get frostbit/get snowed under/get even less intelligent?
Well, this was one of several slovenian expeditions in last few years. A couple of guys stayed in the mountain. Nobody risked their life to save them. When you try to climb Everest and you don't come down, people tend to leave you there rather than stupidly risk their life trying to find you.
IIRC, the problem with "Big tobacco" is that they claimed that dangers of smoking (ooooohhh sounds scary) were not proven, even though they knew it was. thus, they were misleading their consumers.
btw: this settlement helped to secure the "Big tobacco" monopoly by establishing a fund of some sort that ALL tobacco companies (even those who never claimed smoking was all good for you, or who didn't exist then, or who don't exist now) have to pay a big (IIRC, fixed for all) amount of money to. so, smaller companies have to go out of business, because at their level of sales, it drives the cost too high.
yeah, but if dust is on the lens, and not on the film/paper, dispersion will take care of it by interpolating the missing dot from surrounding skyxels.
so, maybe we should view dead pixels as dust on lens, not on film/paper.
with a few forums (=webified news groups) for people to report (= mention) that there might be a bug or that they might know how to get rid of it.
and then, there are moderated discussions (running slashcode) of ways to get rid of a bug and on implementing the good riddance.
The moderators (=mozilla or another project bug managers) decide which of the bugs mentioned in the forums are really bugs (and have not been reported before), stick them in bugzilla and, if not trivial, start a discussion about it.
Here the developers (core and others) come in and discuss the stuff and in the end it gets implemented.
If your classes and objects are organized right, this shouldn't happen and it fact often doesn't with small projects. However, as projects grow, little mistakes and wrong decisions made at the beginning tend to turn into wide cracks.
The answer to this would be, as some others noted, to write it from the scratch. This, however can not be the general fix - that's why people invented OO and modular programming.
I think that the time will come when the programming tools (and math behind the whole thing) will be so advanced that it will become easy for a good programmer to start the project right and develop it in any direction, thus reducing risks of this sort to a minimum.
I say "good programmer" cause we all know that an idiots with power tools just tend to produce rubbish at a greater rate.
hehe... my browser died after that. serves me right:)
seriously though, this type of thing may or may not be the typical security hole of the future. in fact, if all the components (at one level, say, in netscape) are fully encapsulated and none of them have internal security flaws, it's hard to imagine how a combination of these would allow any breaches.
however, you can assure this only in the components you're writing or at least have the source code to, which means that open source can make quite a difference, but not because of the "way that components work together", but because if anyone can see how a component works, it will be much more probable that someone will find the hole.
you can not control all the levels, though. even if we (in few years) get to the point where your computer (used for serious stuff by a fairly advanced user) can be run entirely by OS software, there's still the question of hardware... do we REALLY know what those CPUs are doing? maybe what we need is an open source CPU and chipset?
Movies will not be free, as will not many other things. The whole concept of "you can't stop us" is ridiculous. No, it can't be stopped totally. But let's just give a lot of lawyers with a lot of money time.
...and watch the society crumble under the financial weight of overgrown legal profession. it will happen, alas.
The:CueCat reader is only on loan to you from Digital:Convergence and may be recalled at any time. Without limiting the foregoing, your possession or control of the:CueCat reader does not transfer any right, title or interest to you in the:CueCat reader.
what happens if I get it and throw it away? can they demand money from me for not being able to return it when they recall it? sounds like bullshit to me.
Bitching about how someone "won't share" is a whiny, sanctimonious attitude more worthy of socialists.
nothing socialist about that. socialism (in a capitalist context) is about people who have a lot of money (because they got all the breaks in the world and in the process exploited other people) giving back to community that made them rich, not about making people work for free.
it's exactly this sort of whiners that make socialism hard to implement.
errr.... how about checking a dictionary or getting a brain?
professional writers means that they make living of it, so of course they can't afford to do it for free. and unlike a program, which can be modular and written by many people who are willing to chip in, a book has to have consistent style and logic, so it must be written by few people and generally edited by one person.
Slashdot Mirror
I once wrote a (very complicated) spreadsheet in Excel to calculate bonuses for drug peddlers at a pharmaceutical company. The problem screamed for a database, but the algorithm for calculating the bonuses was so complicated that it as a royal pain in the ass when I tried it. So I ended up with a fugly spreadsheet that still works 5 years on.
The ridiculous thing was that it could've all been well approximated with an exponential function, but that idea was a big no-no. The bonus algorithm is sacred.
In (mathematics) open-book exams I've taken, the books were essential. The highest scored solutions consisted of recognizing the problem, butchering equations for a few lines, and then pointing to the correct page in the correct book. The people who got highest grades were done in 15 minutes, though you were allowed to sit for at least 3 hours.
But, of course, to do that, you had to actually understand what it was all about, and you certainly couldn't learn that in 3 hours with all the books in the world.
If you are born without a tongue the government doesn't pay for the surgery to make one. If your tongue gets cut off the government doesn't foot the bill to sew it back on.
That depends on where you live.
What you are seeing now is cached static copies of articles that are normally generated on the fly (turns out rendering of wikicode is not a bottleneck in the whole thing plus rendering of pages needs to be at least partly dynamic for several reasons).
The two web servers serve pages from the database server, which is where all data is, so if that croaks, the whole thing croaks.
Running a huge mult-language encyclopaedia with complete revision history for all pages, proper interlinking and redirecting of pages, discussion about articles, daily discussion, etc. is not a small thing.
The site is just way too big (traffic on par with slashdot.org or sun.com, database size 35 MB) to be run on creaky machines. It needs proper hardware.
it is in most of europe.
z.
while i do agree that poverty is not the main reason why people get into dealing dope, it's one of the main reasons why they start using serious stuff - when your life sucks and you have no way of making it better, it certainly makes sense to get high to feel good for at least a while. so eliminating poverty (whatever that means) would help the real problems.
chasing a kid with a joint doesn't.
z.
could you really?
z.
I'm wonderig... What happens if you go to sleep or pass out? Does your consciousness die and when you wake up you have a new consciousness which is the copy of the one before?
z.
Did they have dividers? I though it was very new when they built it into 486DX2 (that was the 2, right?).
anyone know?
z.
I wonder how much money and how many people risk thier lives to go rescue these idiots when they get lost/break a leg/get frostbit/get snowed under/get even less intelligent?
Well, this was one of several slovenian expeditions in last few years. A couple of guys stayed in the mountain. Nobody risked their life to save them. When you try to climb Everest and you don't come down, people tend to leave you there rather than stupidly risk their life trying to find you.
Well, it's not bad for statistics. It tells you that 99% of people who care enough to vote for XY use XY.
now, that's useful info :)
z.
IIRC, the problem with "Big tobacco" is that they claimed that dangers of smoking (ooooohhh sounds scary) were not proven, even though they knew it was. thus, they were misleading their consumers.
btw: this settlement helped to secure the "Big tobacco" monopoly by establishing a fund of some sort that ALL tobacco companies (even those who never claimed smoking was all good for you, or who didn't exist then, or who don't exist now) have to pay a big (IIRC, fixed for all) amount of money to. so, smaller companies have to go out of business, because at their level of sales, it drives the cost too high.
z.
imagine it this way:
Company X has a 90% market share in GSM. They allow you to connect people who use it by either:
a) using their service
b) from outside, using an inferior service, say stationary phone
I'm aware that it's free, but I don't like it anyway. I think that protocols meant for public use should be public.
z.
Yep, spelled (right about): 6opw, that w and , are actually one letter (and are supposed to be connected) and are the shch sound. IANARC either z.
yeah, but if dust is on the lens, and not on the film/paper, dispersion will take care of it by interpolating the missing dot from surrounding skyxels.
so, maybe we should view dead pixels as dust on lens, not on film/paper.
z.
with a few forums (=webified news groups) for people to report (= mention) that there might be a bug or that they might know how to get rid of it.
and then, there are moderated discussions (running slashcode) of ways to get rid of a bug and on implementing the good riddance.
The moderators (=mozilla or another project bug managers) decide which of the bugs mentioned in the forums are really bugs (and have not been reported before), stick them in bugzilla and, if not trivial, start a discussion about it.
Here the developers (core and others) come in and discuss the stuff and in the end it gets implemented.
could work.
z.
hey, this should be moderated as "Funny" z.
If your classes and objects are organized right, this shouldn't happen and it fact often doesn't with small projects. However, as projects grow, little mistakes and wrong decisions made at the beginning tend to turn into wide cracks.
The answer to this would be, as some others noted, to write it from the scratch. This, however can not be the general fix - that's why people invented OO and modular programming.
I think that the time will come when the programming tools (and math behind the whole thing) will be so advanced that it will become easy for a good programmer to start the project right and develop it in any direction, thus reducing risks of this sort to a minimum.
I say "good programmer" cause we all know that an idiots with power tools just tend to produce rubbish at a greater rate.
z.
hehe... my browser died after that. serves me right:)
seriously though, this type of thing may or may not be the typical security hole of the future. in fact, if all the components (at one level, say, in netscape) are fully encapsulated and none of them have internal security flaws, it's hard to imagine how a combination of these would allow any breaches.
however, you can assure this only in the components you're writing or at least have the source code to, which means that open source can make quite a difference, but not because of the "way that components work together", but because if anyone can see how a component works, it will be much more probable that someone will find the hole.
you can not control all the levels, though. even if we (in few years) get to the point where your computer (used for serious stuff by a fairly advanced user) can be run entirely by OS software, there's still the question of hardware... do we REALLY know what those CPUs are doing? maybe what we need is an open source CPU and chipset?
z.
z.
The :CueCat reader is only on loan to you from Digital:Convergence and may be recalled at any time. Without limiting the foregoing, your possession or control of the :CueCat reader does not transfer any right, title or interest to you in the :CueCat reader.
what happens if I get it and throw it away? can they demand money from me for not being able to return it when they recall it? sounds like bullshit to me.
z.
nothing socialist about that. socialism (in a capitalist context) is about people who have a lot of money (because they got all the breaks in the world and in the process exploited other people) giving back to community that made them rich, not about making people work for free.
it's exactly this sort of whiners that make socialism hard to implement.
z.
errr.... how about checking a dictionary or getting a brain?
professional writers means that they make living of it, so of course they can't afford to do it for free. and unlike a program, which can be modular and written by many people who are willing to chip in, a book has to have consistent style and logic, so it must be written by few people and generally edited by one person.
z.
hmm... I haven't read anywhere that Bayer Pharmaceuticals is stopping the production of Aspirin(R) because everybody else is also producing it. z.
yeah, people. really, go check out the story. this IS amazingly ridiculous.
z.