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User: fm6

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Comments · 12,706

  1. Re:Job Reclaimation, not creation. on Court Orders Shutdown of H-1B Critics' Websites · · Score: 1

    Save me from my delusions! Tell me when the overseas trade wasn't vital to the U.S. economy!

    I'm assuming your argument is based on actual facts. If not, spare me your name calling.

  2. Re:What a crap story on Fake "Bill Gates" Message Dupes Top Tools · · Score: 1

    No magic required. Just a mail system that doesn't make it so easy to forge a return address. Like a lot of tech that dates back to the pre-commercial internet, SMTP takes too much on trust.

  3. Re:The Fate of Coffee on IT Workers To Get Fewer Perks, No Free Coffee · · Score: 1

    Corporations are dominated by bean counters. Literally!

  4. The Fate of Coffee on IT Workers To Get Fewer Perks, No Free Coffee · · Score: 1

    shut off the free coffee (it wasn't that good anyway)

    Bad coffee is just an intermediate step. I worked at one Big Dot Com 11 years ago where the free coffee was Peet's, with the beans ground just before brewing. Came back to the same BDC 3 years ago, and they'd switched to the Sara Lee Coffee Service, which provides coffee not quite as good as what you get at a seedy donut shop. Then they replaced that with this obscene little single-serving dispenser that "brewed" something about as drinkable as instant.

  5. Re:TLDR version on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 1

    I may have been wrong to generalize. But I know for a fact that no Java-based GUI library keeps the event loop in the same thread as the rest of the application.

  6. Re:Thread != Process on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 1

    You're right. I'm wrong. But.

    First the YRIW part. Your comment made me go back and refresh my (obviously very stale) Windows programming knowledge. And in the process I came up with a very simple proof that event-driven programming does absolutely need threads: the standard message-loop paradigm "works" on 16-bit Windows, which doesn't even have a process scheduler, much less multithreading support. I believe early versions of MacOS were similar.

    (What? You've never heard of 16-bit Windows? You young wipersnappers with your 64-bit OSs don't know how good you have it!)

    But (and here's where I explain why I put "works" in quotes): GUI programs that don't use any kind of multithreading are pretty limited. Say you need to do something in the background — which any non-trivial program needs to do! If the code that does this long task needs to run in the same thread as the message loop, then you have two choices: (a) let the program freeze up everytime it's doing something time-consuming (not acceptable!) (b) have the code yield control back to the message loop periodically. To implement (b) you have to create some kind of mechanism for the background code to be woken up periodically. And you have to create mechanisms so that this code and other code can share information without stepping on each other's feet.

    And if you do that, what have you done? You've gone and kludged together a primitive multithreading mechanism! You might as well save yourself all that extra work (and avoid problems other people have already solved for you) by building on a multithreaded platform.

    So I stand by my original statement (though not my bogus MFC-based defense of it) that any well-written GUI uses multithreading.

  7. Re:Thread != Process on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 2, Informative

    I might have this wrong, but I believe event-driven programs are, by their nature, multithreaded. This might not be obvious if you write a program by plugging event handlers into an event framework, such as MFC. But multithreading is still going on in the framework.

  8. Re:Thread != Process on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The writer's mistake is more basic than just conflating threads and processes. You left out the parenthesis:

    still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors)

    Which not only conflates cores and processors, but also suggests that multithreading isn't useful if you don't have multiple cores/processors.

    When I was writing the concurrency chapter in the Java Tutorial, the experts would give me a very hard time if I allowed even a vague suggestion that this was true. The fact is, threads are extremely useful even if you only have one core to work with. For example, any well-written GUI program will not handle user interaction in the same thread with other functions; if it did, the GUI would freeze every time the program were waiting on something.

    Multithreading is a big topic these days because everybody wants to maximize their utilization of all these n-core processors. But it's not a new topic.

    This mistake seems to be very common. Which leaves me confused as to what's new here. It's not parallel downloading of files — Mozilla/Firefox has always done that. A more robust parallelism mechanism? Or maybe they're copying Chrome and giving each tab its own process (not thread!).

  9. Re:I'll believe it when I see it on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    And with software for MSN, which was supposed to be Microsoft's AOL killer. But the web had already rendered the "online service" concept obsolete.

    Microsoft had anticipated the growth of the Internet just fine. Their mistake was believing that the web was just a passing fad.

  10. Re:Always the same on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    Sigh. Your anti-corporate rant (which, believe it on not, I pretty much agree with) is beside the point. The fact remains that IPv6 is a solution, anything else is just a kludgy expensive workaround.

  11. Re:No need to panic. on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    I know it was a joke. A very tired, ill-informed joke.

  12. Re:I'll believe it when I see it on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    Anything can be done, if you have enough money. The question is, where does the money come from?

  13. Re:I'll believe it when I see it on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Do you think the current owners are hanging onto their address spaces out of pure spite? If they rely on the Internet to do business, this crisis hurts them more than anybody.

    This mess happened because of the simplistic addressing schemes that were implemented without taking into account the explosive growth of the Internet. One result is that that some early adopters ended up with Class A networks (16 million addresses) because they needed more than the 64 thousand addresses in a Class B network. Only one Class A space belongs to a university (MIT). (There used to be two, but Stanford gave its IP space back.) Other owners include Halliburton, Apple, IBM, and Xerox PARC. HP has two, counting the one that was originally issued to DEC. DoD has eight.

    Reassigning all these addresses would be a logistical nightmare, because you're changing the basic logic of network routing. Imagine all the routers that would have to be reprogrammed or replaced, and the expensive down time that would result. Much more cost effective to just go to IPv6 already. Plus there are other features of IPv6 we really, really need.

    Except that nobody's doing it. I used to work at Sun, where I kept suggesting that our embedded lights-out management system (all Sun servers have them) start supporting IPv6. The answer I always got was, "customers aren't asking for it." Which means that everybody is putting off this problem until the last minute. As usual.

  14. Re:No need to panic. on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Ah, nothing like a hot cup of sarcasm with a touch of irony to keep warm...

    Nothing like repeating the same old "stupid liberal" cliches for the millionth time.

  15. Re:Who are the victims? on Scambaiting Gets Comical; Internet Scammers All Dressed Up · · Score: 1

    Consider that anybody with access to the internet (and nowadays, that's anybody who lives in an urban area, and quite a few who don't) can launch a 419 scam. No need for a big perfidious organization. And such an organization would surely hire a few people to write better (as in "literate") scam letters.

    How do you scambait Somali pirates? Bearing in mind the risks of playing games with the heavily armed and bloodthirsty.

  16. Re:Only one question... on Google Nexus One Hands-On, Video, and Impressions · · Score: 1

    There's much to like about the Pre, feature-wise anyway. The one thing that makes me hesitate is Palm's long decline in quality. I use to be a rabid fan of Palm, but each generation of products has been flakier than the last. The last straw was my Centro, which had too many problems to mention, and finally stopped working in less than a year. After I ditched it I vowed never to buy another Palm product. The Pre tests that resolution, but not quite enough.

  17. Re:Only one question... on Google Nexus One Hands-On, Video, and Impressions · · Score: 2, Informative

    and if you have WiFi in your house (who doesn't?) you'll be off and running with high speed internet access when you're at home.

    If you have WiFi in your house, you already have that, and without having to deal with the tiny screen and awkward data entry.

    In a phone, Wifi is a fallback, at best. The only advantage a phone has over other internet devices is portability. And "must be near a hotspot" is not portability.

  18. Re:Only one question... on Google Nexus One Hands-On, Video, and Impressions · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are the right wingnuts resorting to calling people "hippies" now? Boy, talk about running low on brainless insults. You guys should have rationed your rudeness to make words like "liberal" and "socialist" last longer. Oh wait, conserving natural resources is "fascism", isn't it?

  19. Re:What matters in fact? on Google Chrome Displaces Safari As Third In Survey · · Score: 1

    Firefox has problems with speed, reliability, and resource leakage. I still use it, but I'd switch to Chrome if it had a decent feature set and a less idiosyncratic user interface.

  20. Re:Disband the TSA on TSA Nominee's Snooping Raises Privacy Concerns · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Disbanding the TSA would be the same as admitting that the last 7 years of security theater was totally pointless. No politician is going to touch that with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

  21. Re:Who doesn't do this? on TSA Nominee's Snooping Raises Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    Well, considering that this nomination has been blocked by a Republican proto-filibuster for almost 3 months now, I suspect this guy has very little privacy left. Ironic, really.

  22. Re:The terrorists aren't even trying hard. on TSA Subpoenas Bloggers Over New Security Directive · · Score: 1

    Most Al Qaeda people are losers, mentally challenged types who can't think through the issues you raised. Even the plotters of the 9/11 attacks were bunglers; they only succeeded because of bureaucratic ineptitude by the organizations that were supposed to be watching out for them.

    And of course that ineptitude is still in place, as this latest episode shows. All we have to show for our response in the last 8 years is an unnecessary war and a lot of security theater. When Obama started talking about "systemic failure" he was the first to approach the problem as a leader, as opposed to a politician.

  23. Re:VOIP sucks. on AT&T Readying For the End of Analog Landlines · · Score: 1

    Give me a bundle of random parts and a headphone or two and I can create an analog phone out of it in an hour or so.

    And talk to who? That's premises equipment, not infrastructure.

    The POTS network has been mostly digital for decades. Only the local loop still uses 40s tech.

  24. Re: *your* VOIP sucks. on AT&T Readying For the End of Analog Landlines · · Score: 1

    Don't assume your experience is typical. Some people live in cell dead spots (I did 6 years ago, which is the last time I had a land line), but most don't. Some people can't get decent VOIP (had a colleague who would Skype into meetings from Shanghai, driving us all crazy with weird noises) but most can.

    VOIP was a pretty flaky technology for a while, mainly because most networks didn't have the capacity for it. That's changed, and a lot of big enterprises rely on it. I've worked at major companies where there are no POTS jacks at all -- all the phones are plugged into ethernet.

  25. Re:Job Reclaimation, not creation. on Court Orders Shutdown of H-1B Critics' Websites · · Score: 1

    You make it a point to conveniently forget that this is how things once were, and everyone was better off for it.

    You honestly believe there was a time when the U.S. didn't trade and compete with the rest of the planet? What's changed is that we have stronger competitors. Fifty years ago, China and India were economic basket cases that couldn't even feed themselves. Now look at them.