Again, you do not know what you are talking about. Jimbo is not a payed employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.
He's paid, he's just not paid by the WMF.
The difference with my POV and yours is that I put my money where my mouth is.
What the heck is supposed to mean? If you're going to make the dubious claim that you put your money where you mouth is, you better damn well specify how you're doing it.
I am sure that there will be few websites running as cheaply as the WMF does.
What you meant to say was that there are few high traffic websites run as cheaply as the WMF is. However, I'm not sure what your point is since it's primarily through donated hardware, bandwidth and man-hours. Those donations aren't cheap by any means and if you want to count voulunteer man-hours then you have to count it in terms of the commercial cost required to employ them.
Just compare the hardware costs for instance.
Huge? Wikipedia runs quite a few opteron based servers, they're not exactly cheap. The hardware costs are higher than they should be due to problems with the software.
Another way is looking at the number of developers and look at the amount of traffic is served.
How is the number of developers a good judgement of quality?! More does not necessarily mean better and Mediawiki doesn't have that many dedicated developers in the first place. That would mean Microsoft makes some of the best software in the world and you're forced to agree following your own silly argument.
And traffic, how is that a judgement of the quality of the developers or admins? Any idiot can keep buying more and more hardware to compensate for ineffeciencies in software in order to serve more bandwidth.
I am sorry but you provide no metrics to back up your claim why the quality is substandard.
Actually I did, but you ignored it and then proceeded to provide these absurd metrics. I judged by *gasp* the quality of the code. Who would have thought that when judging a website you would judge its code?! Or the amount of time spent working on it, is that a bad metric? I also judged based on the unreliability and slowness of the website, who would have thought those were good measures?!
You characterise one of my arguments as a strawman. Well, you hide behind the back of someone else. That is cheap.
Huh? Your two arguments were a strawman, you suggested I said something which I mostly definitely did not say. Who am I hiding behind the back of? You're not making any sense.
About corporate sponsorship; we have some of it.
Yeah, not nearly as much as you could have and certainly enough to cause enough problems that you needed to fire a full time employee in the past.
The argument that some people are against it is just that.
Huh???
Your suggestion that professional programmers do not work with trial and error is.. based on what ?
WTF?! I said the admins do, not that the programmers do. Geez, talk about a strawman. All your poor arguments here and extremely poor grasp of mine make me doubt that English is your native language. Seriously, what is your native language?
Often software does not work as advertised in manuals..
You mean their own software that they wrote doesn't work as they advertised it? Buh? That's not the problem anyway, the software does work as advertised, they just didn't test it before hand to see what kind of load it could handle.
When the amount of servers go up, you find that at the same time the usage of the servers goes up.
No, that's completely backwards. They buy new servers because the usage has gone up too far.
The demand for information is such that throwing hardware at the problem gives an equal amount of new users.
Equal to what? Do you have some statistics to back that up? The usage
Yes, that's a standard reply and a very naive one at that. People don't have all the time nor interest/motivation to fix every single piece of FOSS software they come across. Heck, you don't even need to have a problem with FOSS software, it can be with commercial software too. "If the commercial software has serious issues, why not write new software from scratch?"
I'm impressed, you actually have a paid full time position now (excluding Jimbo himself).
Your suggestion that paid full time administrators are always superior is your POV and given Wikimedia's policies on POVs you know where you stand.
First of all, that's a strawman argument, I never said paid full time admins are ALWAYS superior, but this is clearly a case where they are needed. That said, you are also expressing your POV here, so following your own strange logic, what you say isn't valid on the basis that it's a POV.
The paid full time admins who have PRIOR experience working on large sites and actually have a better work ethic due to the threat of being fired/demoted if their job isn't up to par. Instead you have what are essentially hobbyists who've studied this at home, but really have little or no prior experience in running a large scale website and all the logistics that go with it (which you can't learn from reading online manuals).
The developpers are volunteers and as such they work on the things that they want to work on. Being volunteers that is there right.
That's true, but at the same time if you criticize their work they suddenly get very defensive and act like no one (aside from people who walk on egg shells around them and suck up) could do better.
If you have stated that your goal is to work a minimum amount of time on it, then at least be willing to accept criticism and acknowledge that it has serious problems when criticized and don't pretend like it's anything more than it is--something with minimal volunteer time put into it.
Your suggestion that no effort is put into Mediawiki is horrible.
Oooh, more strawman. I never said that, I was simply paraphrasing something Tim Starling himself said in a presentation regarding MediaWiki. He specifically stated that the design was to be made so the minimal work possible has to be done on it, which is quite startling because usually OSS projects will at least *pretend* to strive for more than the bare minimum.
If only a paid programmer can be found, than it is up to the person who wants it to make the money flow.
That sounds like an issue that could be resolved with corporate sponsorship, oh wait, that idea gets continually rejected with various excuses. "wah wah, we'll have to put ads up" even though clearly there are sponsors willing to do that without them. Even now with the whole google thing they are rejecting the idea because they are too sloppy and disorganized to come up with a proposal for what exactly they're going to do with the funding.
This can also be resolved by realizing that they can optimize mediawiki a lot better, reduce a lot of overhead and result in less dependency on constant hardware upgrades (oooh save money!)
Your suggestion that the Mediawiki developers do not have experience with high traffic websites is stupid. The Wikimedia servers are high traffic websites.
Actually I said wikipedia admins, not mediawiki developers, but ok. They clearly don't have any background in this, at their own admittance (on IRC), a lot of what they do is trial and error because they haven't done it before.
The admins also totally rejected the idea that anyone else in the world could possibly have similar experience running high traffic websites because there are none running a wiki that big, even though there's a lot of cross-over in experience from other types of sites.
Basically, they admint they don't really know what they're doing and at the same time come off with the arrogant attitude that they know better than everyone else in the world. Kind of a contradiction, but who expects incompetent morons who can't even place an order for hardware far enough in advance to be logical?
Oh yeah, did I mention that they're easily offended if you offer help? They're very stubborn, but also have their egos easily bruised if you challenge them. This is true of the programmers
And this is exactly why Wikipedia has so much down time. You guys need admins who aren't so damn incompetent. I'm surprised by the number of "oopses" they make and their lack of experience with high bandwidth sites.
This is a classic case of considering the hardware to be the problem rather than the software. The software has serious issues when it comes to performance and the developers are very slow to address it. Hell, Tim Starling, a lead developer, even stated that one of the design goals of the MediaWiki software was to spend as little time as possible developing it. I kid you not, that's paraphrasing something (with NO exaggeration) that was said in a presentation document which I can find if anyone doesn't believe me.
I've heard some whining from some of the developers because they didn't have a ready made solution for certain things, meaning they would have to put actual *effort* into making their own. The idea of writing glue code (to C code) to make up for a feature lacking in existing php libraries was considered an abhorrent thing.
Their best response to me pointing out flaws in their "development philosophy" was to them retort with the oh-so-clever "well why don't you write something better yourself?" Of course, that phrase is just a code word for "we know it sucks and we're just not willing to put all the extra effort into rewriting major portions of it." Really, it's sad when you have to define your software in terms of someone else (your opponent specifically) not writing something better.
This isn't just unfounded complaints either. The developers have often complained that the existing implementation (and especially the choice to write the original code in PHP) needs to be rid of. They've said it has "everything and the kitchen sink" and that it degrades performance, but aren't trying that hard to get rid of it. They know this as a matter of fact through testing--Mediawiki has a massive overhead in setup time compared to other wiki software.
Not just that, but the Wikipedia admins are all volunteers and aren't exactly the cream of the crop. They took them as volunteers since they were the best ones to devote that much time to it and unfortunately that means they're mediocre and they REALLY are not experienced for such a high traffic website.
If they actually had a paid full time admin who had considerable background in sites like this, you'd suddenly see a massive drop in down time and other problems.
And all you have to go on is Alexa ratings, which isn't exactly a good measure. Most people don't use Alexa and most people don't even know what Wikipedia is. Try a better measurement and you might have a good argument.
He said that he's just archiving the footage, so I wouldn't think he'd be modifying it in any way. What I don't understand is that he said they're uncompressed, but that can't be true since he's getting a bitrate that would correspond with compressed video.
Most or all of those DV formats use compression by default and mpeg-2 at that, so how can those not be considered sufficient for editing? Maybe if you're a super high priced production company you can afford to do everything in an uncompressed form, but I can't imagine it'd be cost effective for so many others.
Yes, I forgot to multiply in 30 frames/sec. That puts NTSC at 230 Mbps and HDTV at 1.42 Gbps. With extra color data (30 bits) it's 324 Mbps and 1.8 Gbps respectively.
I'm not sure what the point in 10 bits per channel is since 8 bpp is considered true color (16,777,216 colors). What are they doing with the extra color data? Are there some kind of transformations that would be done to archived video footage that require extra color data for more accuracy?
25Mbps for *theater* quality and 19.4Mbps for HDTV quality. I don't see where te heck he's getting such a higher bit rate from and clearly HDTV is high enough quality for broadcast.
And doing the math for NTSC uncompressed:
525 * 720 * 24 = 8.65Mbit/s
For HDTV unceompressed (max resolution):
1920 * 1080 * 24 = 47.46Mbit/s
That's about 50Mbit/s, so I'm guessing the guy is trying to store uncompressed HDTV video.
How did you get $10/month? Did you actually bother to do any calculations or did you pull that figure out of your ass?
I don't know what you pay, but for me it's $0.07 per kilowatt-hour.
If these people are continually running their systems anyway, the extra power on top isn't going to be much. For every EXTRA 100 watts used, that would be 24 hours*100 W/1000 kW*0.07 dollars = $0.16 extra per day.
Most cpus are not going to breach 100W power consumption even at full power consumption. I did a check and only the pentium 4 prescott exceeds it, with pentium 4 northwood at 84W and Athlon 64 at 63W.
Now, even assuming that you went from 0% cpu usage idle (yeah right) to 100%, this would cost a total of $5.04 per month, running 24/7 with 100W extra power usage.
Stop being an anal retentive alarmist fuckwit and crunch your numbers.
Uhm, what? You're missing a ton of platforms. It also seems that some of those which you list netbsd as not supporting may actually be supported by it.
If you're going to compile a list, at least get it right. It seems like you just decided to group together incompatible architectures exclusively on the basis that they have the same cpu.
In fact, you even grouped some later generation cpus with earlier ones that aren't compatible (arm vs. strongarm). You can't put ppc, mips, arm, m68k and so forth under the same classification, since there are many different architectures.
First of all, you're assuming that all temperature changes to the room immediately change the ambient temperature. This is not the case, the temperature is not evenly distributed through out the room. In case you don't remember, heat rises, so it wouldn't be in his bed which is down low.
Second of all, this isn't a closed system. He has his window open, so the heat can rise to the top and escape out the window. This can be further aided by having an elevated fan directed to blow air out the window.
You're missing something. The image may be more spread out, but it's also significantly degraded in quality. Half the resolution at twice the size and it's not nicely anti-aliased for you. I'd rather have half the resolution at half the size, with anti-aliasing and an actual decent scaling algorithm (as opposed to none at all).
You're also overloooking the fact that the set of lenses necessary needs to be custom made for each model of monitor (and equiavlent) there is. Lenses, espcially fresnel/diffraction gratings of that size are not that cheap and even more so when you have a low supply for a given display.
Google says that custom made diffraction gratings and fresnel lenses are used to do that. It appears stuff like this, including a lot fo 3D vision stuff from back when it was cool, is old news.
If you notice, the guy only demonstrated the "interactive" aspect of his "new" technology, which is just a camera hooked up to some software which knows when to change the image.
This is also nothing new, there have been video games around for a while now where the person plays the game by moving in front of the camera. Of course, those bombed badly, even when sony marketed theirs.
He doesn't include any information about the quality of the images produced by "dual monitor use" (not multi monitor as he says) nor do the videos provided give any information about them.
Honestly, I think he realized that no one would care about this already attempted "dual monitor" technology, so he added in this "interactive camera" technology to make it seem less sad. I am really surprised that he was allowed to do this fro a thesis, the standards of education are really low.
THE REASON WHY HE WON'T DEMONSTRATE THE DUAL MONITOR TECH:
It's because while it is possible to do (using a set of custom optics attached to the display [each display model needs its own custom set]), the quality of the resulting dual images is low. With a high resolution display, it kind of defeats the purpose to have a lower quality image. Mind you, that one will probably be worse than getting two seperate displays of somewhat lower quality for the same price.
I think the pigeon hole principle, or some physical variant of it, applies here. Perhaps something like "conservation of resolution/pixels"? You're using the same amount of pixels to drive two displays instead of one, so inevitably you must sacrifice quality since each pixel can only display one thing at a time.
Let's say he tries to be smart and multiplexes the display, quickly switching back and forth between the two full resolution images/videos.
Although I'm not sure how even that would work, because it's not as if the lens could refract the light rays in one direction during one refresh and refract them in another direction during the other refresh. So inevitably the colors from one image are going to mix in with another and/OR you're going to have an obviously degraded resolution.
Well as you said, this wouldn't work well on compressed files. Assuming that distributing a raw.exe is no big deal (you could say it was compressed within the exe), I think these people who examine the files before voting on them would pick up on it quickly.
The way I see it there are two types of "attack files":
1. The random blob is meaningful data, such as a public key in a certificate. 2. The format allows for code to be used (like with postscript).
In the case of programs, only #2 really applies. It is possible to insert junk data in an executable easily, there are many sections that you can just fill with meanginless garbage, which vary depending on the platform.
The real issue is that, like with the postscript file, you'd need both versions of the executable in the same file. People examining the executable could look through an assembly dump of the file and see that somewhere in the beginning there is code that decides, based off some random junk data, to decide to execute one part or another.
This can be easily thwarted with the heurestics in virus checkers. Just like with viruses, people will try reusing code, the code that decides which section to execute based off the random junk data. Likewise, people will use similar means to store junk data.
Now it's true, someone could get clever, encrypt the startup code (make it polymorphic) and do tricks to modify it so it appears to be new, BUT the same also applies to new viruses/trojans and their variants. So really, you're back to where you started from--forced to write new trojans/viruses (or rather, new startup code using similar techniques) to get around the anti-virus software.
I'd be interested to see how this attack is actually useful in the real world. Even given that they're using a code-base format like postscript, under what strange scenario is an organization going to rely on important documents being digitally signed by people other than the original creator? Any kind of contract or important document is going to be hand signed with at least one witness.
This attack is easily revealed too. A simple examination of the postscript documents shows that it contains two versions--the neferious and non-nefarious versions. Not just that, but the person signing the document will most likely have a copy of the non-nefarious version stored, so if someone tries to pull some fraud, they just whip out the version _they_ received and show that the hashes match up.
The only other use I've seen usggested is for generating two certificates (or any equivalent) with different public keys. But what would be the use in that since it would have to be the same person generating both certificates? Congratulations Mr. Hacker, you can generate two certificates with different keys that both appear to come from Mr. Hacker.
Even without technical knowledge of all this, could you really get away with any of this? If a contract or official "command" document of some kind was forged, people would find out the instant someone tried to take advantage of what they have done that something fishy was going on.
Really, how dense do you have to be to not notice that suddenly a low level employee is going into high access areas despite no one being informed about it beyond a single electronic document? How dense do you have to be to a) not notice a big change in a contract and b) not keep a personal copy of what you signed? Frankly, it would be easier to just swap *printed* forms of contracts than it would be to do this electronci forgery since no one uses electronic contracts like that anyway.
I'd disagree with both. Your attack requires a set of very idealistic conditions that wouldn't even exist on a server and even then it doesn't appear that you've actually tested the viability of said ideal condition, unless you left some actual test data on accuracy out of your paper. That would be necessary since it's probabilistic, the timings aren't going to be exact even in the supposedly ideal conditions.
Assuming that it works under ideal conditions, then the only thing that can be running is a single process donig some type of public key operation and all other processes must essentially be idle. That is in no way, shape or form indicative of a server environment, which will have many different things running at the same time.
You really have to construct a very odd hypothetical scenario for this to work even in theory.
1.a. We are not talking about complex medical equipment and corresponding safety critical software. We are talking about a rather simple sensor device.
1.b. This is something can be easily scientifically controlled and tested, as it just gives out a single read-out based on known levels of alcohol in a person. I'm sure there would be no trouble in finding volunteers for such a study as long as the alcohol was free.
2. The source and internal workings of the Therac-25 were not reviewed in any serious capacity by an independent third party (i.e. the FDA).
What is necessary is for the the company to hand over the source and schematics of the breathalizer to independent researchers and a government body for review. They will provide their own analyses both through "black box" scientific testing and a thorough audit of the schematics/source. The reviewers will all sign NDAs, so any claims of losing money by exposing trade secrets are negated.
Lastly, safety critical equipement (i.e. all medical equipment) is required BY LAW to meet certain specific tolerances with the electronics involved. I'm not sure of the software standards, but I know the hardware ones are strict and MANDATORY. Why shouldn't the manufacture of devicees used to convict be held to the same standard?
There are quite a few FOSS projects that spit in the face of portability. Quite a few are written by programmers who will use Linux specific code in a C/C++ program when there was absolutely no reason to. These are purely userland programs that have hard coded stuff that relies on the system being structured a certain way and have a specific implementation of a specific interface provided (e.g. relying on very specific headers that you're not supposed to directly include, where you're supposed to include higher-level portable headers that indirectly include them).
As a result, the code doesn't work even in BSD systems without tedious, manual modifications to the code.
GHDL is a good and rather frustrating example I've encountered. The author seems to be too apathetic to bother testing it on anything outside of Linux.
Frankly, it sickens me to think that authors don't just make the code *nix specific, but they make it Linux specific for purely userland programs where no special kernel functionality is needed.
Even worse is that many of these projects, especially GUI ones (e.g. KDE and gnome), don't give a shit about having ports to the two most popular platforms--Windows and OS X. It's not that they haven't gotten around to it (after many years), it's that they don't want to integrate it into the code base. There are some porting efforts (kludges), but they will forever refuse to integrate them. The only chance I see of them doing it is if the windows port is actually superior to the X "port." Since when does being a FOSS developer mean you have to be fervently against developing for commercial OSes (especially Windows)?
I think it goes against a basic, core principle of FOSS, in fact. The idea is that the software is supposed to be free (as in speech) for everyone to use. Deliberately limiting it to a tiny portion of users goes against that principle. And the worst part is that a lot of the more naive coders who don't think about this kind of stuff get duped into using non-portable libraries. GTK+ is one of the most popular, if not the most, *nix GUI libs. And yet, GTK+'s still only supports one platform outside of X and that's with an unofficial hack for windows.
gEDA is utter crap. No seriously, I've never heard a single computer or electrical engineer EVER call it good.
You can get free (somewhat limited versions of) _commercial_ EDA tools from companies like Orcad, Xilinx and Altera. These are actually decent and are used in the industry.
gEDA is basically just a laughing stock now. It's a cute little project that might be interesting as a little toy "oooh look---open source EDA," but for now, no one takes it seriously.
Maybe 10 years from now it will become viable, but right now it's just silly. Even as a hobby tool it's kind of pathetic. It's not even just the limited functionality either. gschem (the schematic capture tool), for example, is an incredibly obnoxious and hard to use interface. The spice simulation tool is purely command line. The other stuff is poorl integterated.
And if you actually want to use your designs on something a FPGA/CPLD/whatever (as in upload it to the physical chip), you'll _need_ to get the software from Altera, Xilinx or whomever to do it. To my knowledge, ther
Yes, because clearly the entire school system should be reformed to gear with the top 1% (a fraction of that even) of students. That would be a great idea! Honestly, the ideas coming from these so-called gifted students are ridiculous, which makes me seriously doubt they ever got into any kind of special class.
We can not look into the future to see a students career in order to tailor their program to them. We can not afford to have a custom tailored program for each student, that's just silly.
Worst of all, these brain dead morons (ooops--I mean gifted people) support the notion that memorization is completely unnecessary. Let me guess, these "gifted" students are blaming teachers for the fact that they have shitty memories and that they didn't have a custom tailored program, which everyone would like to have. They did crappy in school and now they're whining.
What's even worse is this reinventing the wheel crap. Improving something is NOT reinventing it. You need base _knowledge_ of something to improve it. EVen the absolute greatest geniuses of all time, with the best tutors of all time, could not be a part of modern scientific endeavors without being taught previous methodologies to build on.
They are simply not going to invent everything in their field from scratch. If that were the case, super string theory would have been invented centuries ago by some of the physics greats. After all, prerequisite _knowledge_ isn't necessary, right?
So in conclusion, stop whining because you have shitty memories and did horribly in school. You're the problem, not the school system.
Does it bother anyone that this guy wrote what is essential just a list for configuration of open source software and placed a very restrictive non-open license on it?
I know that collections, under certain circumstances, can be copyrighted. This, however, is raw list of websites. That is not any more copyrightable than a simple list of urls.
Why the hell would a government agency, the Department of Defense especially, make you sign a non-compete agreement? Are they worried that you'll start "competing" by designing missle systems for Iran?
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Again, you do not know what you are talking about. Jimbo is not a payed employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.
.. based on what ?
He's paid, he's just not paid by the WMF.
The difference with my POV and yours is that I put my money where my mouth is.
What the heck is supposed to mean? If you're going to make the dubious claim that you put your money where you mouth is, you better damn well specify how you're doing it.
I am sure that there will be few websites running as cheaply as the WMF does.
What you meant to say was that there are few high traffic websites run as cheaply as the WMF is. However, I'm not sure what your point is since it's primarily through donated hardware, bandwidth and man-hours. Those donations aren't cheap by any means and if you want to count voulunteer man-hours then you have to count it in terms of the commercial cost required to employ them.
Just compare the hardware costs for instance.
Huge? Wikipedia runs quite a few opteron based servers, they're not exactly cheap. The hardware costs are higher than they should be due to problems with the software.
Another way is looking at the number of developers and look at the amount of traffic is served.
How is the number of developers a good judgement of quality?! More does not necessarily mean better and Mediawiki doesn't have that many dedicated developers in the first place. That would mean Microsoft makes some of the best software in the world and you're forced to agree following your own silly argument.
And traffic, how is that a judgement of the quality of the developers or admins? Any idiot can keep buying more and more hardware to compensate for ineffeciencies in software in order to serve more bandwidth.
I am sorry but you provide no metrics to back up your claim why the quality is substandard.
Actually I did, but you ignored it and then proceeded to provide these absurd metrics. I judged by *gasp* the quality of the code. Who would have thought that when judging a website you would judge its code?! Or the amount of time spent working on it, is that a bad metric? I also judged based on the unreliability and slowness of the website, who would have thought those were good measures?!
You characterise one of my arguments as a strawman. Well, you hide behind the back of someone else. That is cheap.
Huh? Your two arguments were a strawman, you suggested I said something which I mostly definitely did not say. Who am I hiding behind the back of? You're not making any sense.
About corporate sponsorship; we have some of it.
Yeah, not nearly as much as you could have and certainly enough to cause enough problems that you needed to fire a full time employee in the past.
The argument that some people are against it is just that.
Huh???
Your suggestion that professional programmers do not work with trial and error is
WTF?! I said the admins do, not that the programmers do. Geez, talk about a strawman. All your poor arguments here and extremely poor grasp of mine make me doubt that English is your native language. Seriously, what is your native language?
Often software does not work as advertised in manuals..
You mean their own software that they wrote doesn't work as they advertised it? Buh? That's not the problem anyway, the software does work as advertised, they just didn't test it before hand to see what kind of load it could handle.
When the amount of servers go up, you find that at the same time the usage of the servers goes up.
No, that's completely backwards. They buy new servers because the usage has gone up too far.
The demand for information is such that throwing hardware at the problem gives an equal amount of new users.
Equal to what? Do you have some statistics to back that up? The usage
Yes, that's a standard reply and a very naive one at that. People don't have all the time nor interest/motivation to fix every single piece of FOSS software they come across. Heck, you don't even need to have a problem with FOSS software, it can be with commercial software too. "If the commercial software has serious issues, why not write new software from scratch?"
I'm impressed, you actually have a paid full time position now (excluding Jimbo himself).
Your suggestion that paid full time administrators are always superior is your POV and given Wikimedia's policies on POVs you know where you stand.
First of all, that's a strawman argument, I never said paid full time admins are ALWAYS superior, but this is clearly a case where they are needed. That said, you are also expressing your POV here, so following your own strange logic, what you say isn't valid on the basis that it's a POV.
The paid full time admins who have PRIOR experience working on large sites and actually have a better work ethic due to the threat of being fired/demoted if their job isn't up to par. Instead you have what are essentially hobbyists who've studied this at home, but really have little or no prior experience in running a large scale website and all the logistics that go with it (which you can't learn from reading online manuals).
The developpers are volunteers and as such they work on the things that they want to work on. Being volunteers that is there right.
That's true, but at the same time if you criticize their work they suddenly get very defensive and act like no one (aside from people who walk on egg shells around them and suck up) could do better.
If you have stated that your goal is to work a minimum amount of time on it, then at least be willing to accept criticism and acknowledge that it has serious problems when criticized and don't pretend like it's anything more than it is--something with minimal volunteer time put into it.
Your suggestion that no effort is put into Mediawiki is horrible.
Oooh, more strawman. I never said that, I was simply paraphrasing something Tim Starling himself said in a presentation regarding MediaWiki. He specifically stated that the design was to be made so the minimal work possible has to be done on it, which is quite startling because usually OSS projects will at least *pretend* to strive for more than the bare minimum.
If only a paid programmer can be found, than it is up to the person who wants it to make the money flow.
That sounds like an issue that could be resolved with corporate sponsorship, oh wait, that idea gets continually rejected with various excuses. "wah wah, we'll have to put ads up" even though clearly there are sponsors willing to do that without them. Even now with the whole google thing they are rejecting the idea because they are too sloppy and disorganized to come up with a proposal for what exactly they're going to do with the funding.
This can also be resolved by realizing that they can optimize mediawiki a lot better, reduce a lot of overhead and result in less dependency on constant hardware upgrades (oooh save money!)
Your suggestion that the Mediawiki developers do not have experience with high traffic websites is stupid. The Wikimedia servers are high traffic websites.
Actually I said wikipedia admins, not mediawiki developers, but ok. They clearly don't have any background in this, at their own admittance (on IRC), a lot of what they do is trial and error because they haven't done it before.
The admins also totally rejected the idea that anyone else in the world could possibly have similar experience running high traffic websites because there are none running a wiki that big, even though there's a lot of cross-over in experience from other types of sites.
Basically, they admint they don't really know what they're doing and at the same time come off with the arrogant attitude that they know better than everyone else in the world. Kind of a contradiction, but who expects incompetent morons who can't even place an order for hardware far enough in advance to be logical?
Oh yeah, did I mention that they're easily offended if you offer help? They're very stubborn, but also have their egos easily bruised if you challenge them. This is true of the programmers
And this is exactly why Wikipedia has so much down time. You guys need admins who aren't so damn incompetent. I'm surprised by the number of "oopses" they make and their lack of experience with high bandwidth sites.
This is a classic case of considering the hardware to be the problem rather than the software. The software has serious issues when it comes to performance and the developers are very slow to address it. Hell, Tim Starling, a lead developer, even stated that one of the design goals of the MediaWiki software was to spend as little time as possible developing it. I kid you not, that's paraphrasing something (with NO exaggeration) that was said in a presentation document which I can find if anyone doesn't believe me.
I've heard some whining from some of the developers because they didn't have a ready made solution for certain things, meaning they would have to put actual *effort* into making their own. The idea of writing glue code (to C code) to make up for a feature lacking in existing php libraries was considered an abhorrent thing.
Their best response to me pointing out flaws in their "development philosophy" was to them retort with the oh-so-clever "well why don't you write something better yourself?" Of course, that phrase is just a code word for "we know it sucks and we're just not willing to put all the extra effort into rewriting major portions of it." Really, it's sad when you have to define your software in terms of someone else (your opponent specifically) not writing something better.
This isn't just unfounded complaints either. The developers have often complained that the existing implementation (and especially the choice to write the original code in PHP) needs to be rid of. They've said it has "everything and the kitchen sink" and that it degrades performance, but aren't trying that hard to get rid of it. They know this as a matter of fact through testing--Mediawiki has a massive overhead in setup time compared to other wiki software.
Not just that, but the Wikipedia admins are all volunteers and aren't exactly the cream of the crop. They took them as volunteers since they were the best ones to devote that much time to it and unfortunately that means they're mediocre and they REALLY are not experienced for such a high traffic website.
If they actually had a paid full time admin who had considerable background in sites like this, you'd suddenly see a massive drop in down time and other problems.
And all you have to go on is Alexa ratings, which isn't exactly a good measure. Most people don't use Alexa and most people don't even know what Wikipedia is. Try a better measurement and you might have a good argument.
He said that he's just archiving the footage, so I wouldn't think he'd be modifying it in any way. What I don't understand is that he said they're uncompressed, but that can't be true since he's getting a bitrate that would correspond with compressed video.
Most or all of those DV formats use compression by default and mpeg-2 at that, so how can those not be considered sufficient for editing? Maybe if you're a super high priced production company you can afford to do everything in an uncompressed form, but I can't imagine it'd be cost effective for so many others.
Yes, I forgot to multiply in 30 frames/sec. That puts NTSC at 230 Mbps and HDTV at 1.42 Gbps. With extra color data (30 bits) it's 324 Mbps and 1.8 Gbps respectively.
I'm not sure what the point in 10 bits per channel is since 8 bpp is considered true color (16,777,216 colors). What are they doing with the extra color data? Are there some kind of transformations that would be done to archived video footage that require extra color data for more accuracy?
There's no way it could be 200 Mb/s. I could store super high resolution true color video uncompressed and it would still be less than that.
h idef_pc.html
This is from an article I just looked up: "Compare this to 19.4Mbs, the standard for HDTV broadcasts, or to the 25Mbs bit-rate of D-Theater movies!"
http://www.theperfectvision.com/newsletter/tpv50/
25Mbps for *theater* quality and 19.4Mbps for HDTV quality. I don't see where te heck he's getting such a higher bit rate from and clearly HDTV is high enough quality for broadcast.
And doing the math for NTSC uncompressed:
525 * 720 * 24 = 8.65Mbit/s
For HDTV unceompressed (max resolution):
1920 * 1080 * 24 = 47.46Mbit/s
That's about 50Mbit/s, so I'm guessing the guy is trying to store uncompressed HDTV video.
How did you get $10/month? Did you actually bother to do any calculations or did you pull that figure out of your ass?
P entium4_Prescott_Feb04.shtml
I don't know what you pay, but for me it's $0.07 per kilowatt-hour.
If these people are continually running their systems anyway, the extra power on top isn't going to be much. For every EXTRA 100 watts used, that would be 24 hours*100 W/1000 kW*0.07 dollars = $0.16 extra per day.
Most cpus are not going to breach 100W power consumption even at full power consumption. I did a check and only the pentium 4 prescott exceeds it, with pentium 4 northwood at 84W and Athlon 64 at 63W.
http://www.a1-electronics.net/Intel_Section/CPUs/
Now, even assuming that you went from 0% cpu usage idle (yeah right) to 100%, this would cost a total of $5.04 per month, running 24/7 with 100W extra power usage.
Stop being an anal retentive alarmist fuckwit and crunch your numbers.
Uhm, what? You're missing a ton of platforms. It also seems that some of those which you list netbsd as not supporting may actually be supported by it.
Here's the COMPLETE list: acorn26 acorn32 algor alpha amd64 amiga amigappc arc arm32 atari bebox cats cesfic cobalt dreamcast evbarm evbmips evbppc evbsh3 evbsh5 hp300 hp700 hpcarm hpcmips hpcsh i386 iyonix luna68k mac68k macppc mipsco mmeye mvme68k mvmeppc netwinder news68k newsmips next68k ofppc pc532 playstation2 pmax pmppc prep sandpoint sbmips sgimips shark sparc sparc64 sun2 sun3 vax x68k xen
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/
If you're going to compile a list, at least get it right. It seems like you just decided to group together incompatible architectures exclusively on the basis that they have the same cpu.
In fact, you even grouped some later generation cpus with earlier ones that aren't compatible (arm vs. strongarm). You can't put ppc, mips, arm, m68k and so forth under the same classification, since there are many different architectures.
First of all, you're assuming that all temperature changes to the room immediately change the ambient temperature. This is not the case, the temperature is not evenly distributed through out the room. In case you don't remember, heat rises, so it wouldn't be in his bed which is down low.
Second of all, this isn't a closed system. He has his window open, so the heat can rise to the top and escape out the window. This can be further aided by having an elevated fan directed to blow air out the window.
You're missing something. The image may be more spread out, but it's also significantly degraded in quality. Half the resolution at twice the size and it's not nicely anti-aliased for you. I'd rather have half the resolution at half the size, with anti-aliasing and an actual decent scaling algorithm (as opposed to none at all).
You're also overloooking the fact that the set of lenses necessary needs to be custom made for each model of monitor (and equiavlent) there is. Lenses, espcially fresnel/diffraction gratings of that size are not that cheap and even more so when you have a low supply for a given display.
Google says that custom made diffraction gratings and fresnel lenses are used to do that. It appears stuff like this, including a lot fo 3D vision stuff from back when it was cool, is old news.
If you notice, the guy only demonstrated the "interactive" aspect of his "new" technology, which is just a camera hooked up to some software which knows when to change the image.
This is also nothing new, there have been video games around for a while now where the person plays the game by moving in front of the camera. Of course, those bombed badly, even when sony marketed theirs.
He doesn't include any information about the quality of the images produced by "dual monitor use" (not multi monitor as he says) nor do the videos provided give any information about them.
Honestly, I think he realized that no one would care about this already attempted "dual monitor" technology, so he added in this "interactive camera" technology to make it seem less sad. I am really surprised that he was allowed to do this fro a thesis, the standards of education are really low.
THE REASON WHY HE WON'T DEMONSTRATE THE DUAL MONITOR TECH:
It's because while it is possible to do (using a set of custom optics attached to the display [each display model needs its own custom set]), the quality of the resulting dual images is low. With a high resolution display, it kind of defeats the purpose to have a lower quality image. Mind you, that one will probably be worse than getting two seperate displays of somewhat lower quality for the same price.
I think the pigeon hole principle, or some physical variant of it, applies here. Perhaps something like "conservation of resolution/pixels"? You're using the same amount of pixels to drive two displays instead of one, so inevitably you must sacrifice quality since each pixel can only display one thing at a time.
Let's say he tries to be smart and multiplexes the display, quickly switching back and forth between the two full resolution images/videos.
Although I'm not sure how even that would work, because it's not as if the lens could refract the light rays in one direction during one refresh and refract them in another direction during the other refresh. So inevitably the colors from one image are going to mix in with another and/OR you're going to have an obviously degraded resolution.
Well as you said, this wouldn't work well on compressed files. Assuming that distributing a raw .exe is no big deal (you could say it was compressed within the exe), I think these people who examine the files before voting on them would pick up on it quickly.
The way I see it there are two types of "attack files":
1. The random blob is meaningful data, such as a public key in a certificate.
2. The format allows for code to be used (like with postscript).
In the case of programs, only #2 really applies. It is possible to insert junk data in an executable easily, there are many sections that you can just fill with meanginless garbage, which vary depending on the platform.
The real issue is that, like with the postscript file, you'd need both versions of the executable in the same file. People examining the executable could look through an assembly dump of the file and see that somewhere in the beginning there is code that decides, based off some random junk data, to decide to execute one part or another.
This can be easily thwarted with the heurestics in virus checkers. Just like with viruses, people will try reusing code, the code that decides which section to execute based off the random junk data. Likewise, people will use similar means to store junk data.
Now it's true, someone could get clever, encrypt the startup code (make it polymorphic) and do tricks to modify it so it appears to be new, BUT the same also applies to new viruses/trojans and their variants. So really, you're back to where you started from--forced to write new trojans/viruses (or rather, new startup code using similar techniques) to get around the anti-virus software.
I'd be interested to see how this attack is actually useful in the real world. Even given that they're using a code-base format like postscript, under what strange scenario is an organization going to rely on important documents being digitally signed by people other than the original creator? Any kind of contract or important document is going to be hand signed with at least one witness.
This attack is easily revealed too. A simple examination of the postscript documents shows that it contains two versions--the neferious and non-nefarious versions. Not just that, but the person signing the document will most likely have a copy of the non-nefarious version stored, so if someone tries to pull some fraud, they just whip out the version _they_ received and show that the hashes match up.
The only other use I've seen usggested is for generating two certificates (or any equivalent) with different public keys. But what would be the use in that since it would have to be the same person generating both certificates? Congratulations Mr. Hacker, you can generate two certificates with different keys that both appear to come from Mr. Hacker.
Even without technical knowledge of all this, could you really get away with any of this? If a contract or official "command" document of some kind was forged, people would find out the instant someone tried to take advantage of what they have done that something fishy was going on.
Really, how dense do you have to be to not notice that suddenly a low level employee is going into high access areas despite no one being informed about it beyond a single electronic document? How dense do you have to be to a) not notice a big change in a contract and b) not keep a personal copy of what you signed? Frankly, it would be easier to just swap *printed* forms of contracts than it would be to do this electronci forgery since no one uses electronic contracts like that anyway.
I'd disagree with both. Your attack requires a set of very idealistic conditions that wouldn't even exist on a server and even then it doesn't appear that you've actually tested the viability of said ideal condition, unless you left some actual test data on accuracy out of your paper. That would be necessary since it's probabilistic, the timings aren't going to be exact even in the supposedly ideal conditions.
Assuming that it works under ideal conditions, then the only thing that can be running is a single process donig some type of public key operation and all other processes must essentially be idle. That is in no way, shape or form indicative of a server environment, which will have many different things running at the same time.
You really have to construct a very odd hypothetical scenario for this to work even in theory.
1.a. We are not talking about complex medical equipment and corresponding safety critical software. We are talking about a rather simple sensor device.
1.b. This is something can be easily scientifically controlled and tested, as it just gives out a single read-out based on known levels of alcohol in a person. I'm sure there would be no trouble in finding volunteers for such a study as long as the alcohol was free.
2. The source and internal workings of the Therac-25 were not reviewed in any serious capacity by an independent third party (i.e. the FDA).
What is necessary is for the the company to hand over the source and schematics of the breathalizer to independent researchers and a government body for review. They will provide their own analyses both through "black box" scientific testing and a thorough audit of the schematics/source. The reviewers will all sign NDAs, so any claims of losing money by exposing trade secrets are negated.
Lastly, safety critical equipement (i.e. all medical equipment) is required BY LAW to meet certain specific tolerances with the electronics involved. I'm not sure of the software standards, but I know the hardware ones are strict and MANDATORY. Why shouldn't the manufacture of devicees used to convict be held to the same standard?
There are quite a few FOSS projects that spit in the face of portability. Quite a few are written by programmers who will use Linux specific code in a C/C++ program when there was absolutely no reason to. These are purely userland programs that have hard coded stuff that relies on the system being structured a certain way and have a specific implementation of a specific interface provided (e.g. relying on very specific headers that you're not supposed to directly include, where you're supposed to include higher-level portable headers that indirectly include them).
As a result, the code doesn't work even in BSD systems without tedious, manual modifications to the code.
GHDL is a good and rather frustrating example I've encountered. The author seems to be too apathetic to bother testing it on anything outside of Linux.
Frankly, it sickens me to think that authors don't just make the code *nix specific, but they make it Linux specific for purely userland programs where no special kernel functionality is needed.
Even worse is that many of these projects, especially GUI ones (e.g. KDE and gnome), don't give a shit about having ports to the two most popular platforms--Windows and OS X. It's not that they haven't gotten around to it (after many years), it's that they don't want to integrate it into the code base. There are some porting efforts (kludges), but they will forever refuse to integrate them. The only chance I see of them doing it is if the windows port is actually superior to the X "port." Since when does being a FOSS developer mean you have to be fervently against developing for commercial OSes (especially Windows)?
I think it goes against a basic, core principle of FOSS, in fact. The idea is that the software is supposed to be free (as in speech) for everyone to use. Deliberately limiting it to a tiny portion of users goes against that principle. And the worst part is that a lot of the more naive coders who don't think about this kind of stuff get duped into using non-portable libraries. GTK+ is one of the most popular, if not the most, *nix GUI libs. And yet, GTK+'s still only supports one platform outside of X and that's with an unofficial hack for windows.
gEDA is utter crap. No seriously, I've never heard a single computer or electrical engineer EVER call it good.
You can get free (somewhat limited versions of) _commercial_ EDA tools from companies like Orcad, Xilinx and Altera. These are actually decent and are used in the industry.
gEDA is basically just a laughing stock now. It's a cute little project that might be interesting as a little toy "oooh look---open source EDA," but for now, no one takes it seriously.
Maybe 10 years from now it will become viable, but right now it's just silly. Even as a hobby tool it's kind of pathetic. It's not even just the limited functionality either. gschem (the schematic capture tool), for example, is an incredibly obnoxious and hard to use interface. The spice simulation tool is purely command line. The other stuff is poorl integterated.
And if you actually want to use your designs on something a FPGA/CPLD/whatever (as in upload it to the physical chip), you'll _need_ to get the software from Altera, Xilinx or whomever to do it. To my knowledge, ther
Yes, because clearly the entire school system should be reformed to gear with the top 1% (a fraction of that even) of students. That would be a great idea! Honestly, the ideas coming from these so-called gifted students are ridiculous, which makes me seriously doubt they ever got into any kind of special class.
We can not look into the future to see a students career in order to tailor their program to them. We can not afford to have a custom tailored program for each student, that's just silly.
Worst of all, these brain dead morons (ooops--I mean gifted people) support the notion that memorization is completely unnecessary. Let me guess, these "gifted" students are blaming teachers for the fact that they have shitty memories and that they didn't have a custom tailored program, which everyone would like to have. They did crappy in school and now they're whining.
What's even worse is this reinventing the wheel crap. Improving something is NOT reinventing it. You need base _knowledge_ of something to improve it. EVen the absolute greatest geniuses of all time, with the best tutors of all time, could not be a part of modern scientific endeavors without being taught previous methodologies to build on.
They are simply not going to invent everything in their field from scratch. If that were the case, super string theory would have been invented centuries ago by some of the physics greats. After all, prerequisite _knowledge_ isn't necessary, right?
So in conclusion, stop whining because you have shitty memories and did horribly in school. You're the problem, not the school system.
Does it bother anyone that this guy wrote what is essential just a list for configuration of open source software and placed a very restrictive non-open license on it?
I know that collections, under certain circumstances, can be copyrighted. This, however, is raw list of websites. That is not any more copyrightable than a simple list of urls.
Welcome to the wonderful world of backups. EFS lets you copy the encrypted files, file for file and decrypt them later.
Why the hell would a government agency, the Department of Defense especially, make you sign a non-compete agreement? Are they worried that you'll start "competing" by designing missle systems for Iran?
Can you link to the actual documents containing the benchmarks showing that? And you're suggesting it's doing this at 10Mhz?