But you do get to share in a community of readers who never read the news articles or get the wrong end of the stick. I mean this wouldn't be slashdot if we didn't start reacting to the article summary that has little or nothing to do with the referenced article;)
Basically, I'm advocating the 80/20 way. Make all of the "obvious" and "simple" scenarios easy, and you'll already get a large performance boost with little effort (its already being done...my parallel loop example can easily be done in virtually all languages, and is already used in many places, and it works quite well).
In a number of cases this means getting the API that you use optimised and doing less improvements yourself. For example your average Java developer could probably push a large part of the burden to the classes offered by the JDK. It doesn't mean that they are totally absolved, but since the 20 percent of the code 80 percent of the time, they are calling is usually part of the JDK, that is a good starting point.
The linux drivers for nvidia suck too, nvidia clearly take a long time to get up to speed on new operating systems, it's one reason I no longer use them. Having said that, they're pretty damn solid, so its most likely becuase vistas so mucked up when it comes to drivers.
Are computers fast enough these days to allow for protected memory for drivers? Given that most crashes are from drivers it would be nice, but how this is realistically?
Now that we are seeing more and more in the way of multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU computers I can definitely see parallelism become more important, for task that can be handled this way. You have to remember that in certain cases trying to parallise a task can end up being less efficient, so what you parallelise will depend on the task in hand. Things like games, media application and scientific applications are usually likely candidates since they are either doing lots of different things at once or have tasks that can be split up into smaller units that don't depend on the outcome of the other. Server applications can to a certain extent, depending whether they are trying to the same resources or not (ftp server, accessing this disk, vs a time server which does not file I/O).
One thing that should also be noted, is that in certain cases you will need to accept increased memory usage, since you want to avoid tasks locking on resources that they don't really need to synchronise until the end of the work unit. In this case it may be cheaper to duplicate resources, do the work and then resynchronise at the end. Like everything it depends on the size and duration of the work unit.
Even if your application is not doing enough to warrant running its tasks in parallel, the operating system could benefit, so that applications don't suffer on sharing resources that don't need to be shared.
Hello? Firefox developers, where are you? You already have a reputation for being sluggish. Why sit back and prove it every time? Is gecko so poorly engineered that it's really hard to fix? Or does nobody care about the actual page rendering side of the web browser? Either way is really bad for firefox's future.
Look on the bright side, they are still in front of IE at this point.
Provided you don't include "slick user interface" in the feature set, that's correct.
Its more than just a "slick interface", its about the total package. It feels thought out in both features and design. It isn't necessarily the greatest, but it gets things working well. It doesn't feel like it was intended to be deciphered by techies. Yes it is a bit expensive, but experience shows that if you provide something that feels right people will buy it. The price of the product is not always about the cost of the parts.
I have an iPod, but it wasn't where I was going originally. I have a Mac and looked around for alternatives to the iPod, to avoid being YAIU (Yet Another iPod User). What I found is that few worked well with the Mac, many were clunky in design, and for the feature set I wanted few were actually cheaper.
Screw a subscription model. It is the one thing that would likely make me want to crack the OS as soon as possible. The closest thing to a subscription model I would accept is one like Apple's: they sell an upgraded OS with new features, improvements et al., every year or so for a reasonable price and I get tempted to put my money down.
The problem with a lot of subscription models is that you pay, get the initial copy of the software and then get pissed because its been three years since you got something for your money.
There are subscription models that work, but unfortunately they seem to be the minority.
Yup. In the UK, here, the Data Protection Act makes it legally dubious to put anyone else's data onto Google. Here, there's a responsibilty to protect personal data.
The truth is, if your provider is in a foreign country, then you should expect that the government can do whatever they want with its hardware - this about territory and not constitution. At the same time your own government is probably going make laws which suits themselves about the data you access. How this mess sorts itself out depends on the government of the day. As an individual you just need to remember that things are complicated when your government is involved and more complicated when you also have another government involved. Many people don't think of geography when it comes to the internet, but sometimes it makes itself apparent when politics gets involved.
This reminds me of RIM, since their servers are located in Canada. The French government asked their ministers not use Blackberries, because data was being handled outside of France and therefore outside of French jurisdiction. If RIM had servers in France, then I am sure there would have been more reassurance.
If there is anything you need to be paranoid about, host it yourself!
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
This is what I thought. Although the author of the article mentioned that they couldn't find an alternative, I would certainly be curious to see if anyone can provide a working alternative, commercial or otherwise. I am sure while 'Meraki' might be larger arse-holes than g**tse.cx, I am sure they would change their approach if there was good competition.
Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is incapable of finding a profit model that suits their needs? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is retroactively applying their license by updating boxes without notice or consent?
China is wiping out Tibetan culture at a fast pace, the only leverage the Tibetans have is international pressure, and in the Olympic year China cannot simply ignore it as it would do normally. They have little hope of success, but this is their last chance before their country is swamped by Chinese immigration and they become fringe slum dwellers in their own land.
In an Olympic year China is going to get noticed more and it is going be to be subject to more criticism. It will be interesting to see whether the IOC decides to boycott the games, since this would be a very delicate move: it would wipe out the dreams of a great number of athletes, say that they were wrong for choosing China, yet at the same time make a point.
Given the Chinese mentality of not wanting to "lose face", the more they are pushed the more they are likely to resist.
That's where the blame is supposed to be placed. It's not as if Slashdot doesn't constantly get screamed at for the same thing, after all... but as is usual they failed to get off their lazy asses and verify their postings to make sure the information in them is still correct. This shouldn't have been posted. It's not your fault, but it still shouldn't have been approved/posted.
Certainly, but I thought half the approval process was getting people to rant and rave on a non-story. This is/. remember;)
Hmm, I wonder how much weight the bucky balls add to the whole solution. If it does not add too much weight, maybe it could be a solution for future airships. Would have to do some research here.
I had a BBC Micro, model B, with 32KiB of memory. I started off with a tape drive and the fiddling of the volume on the tape player, before discovering the joys of the floppy disk. Certain applications were installed by adding a new ROM and hoping you didn't break any legs while doing it. My favourite games at that point were Elite, Frak and Repton.
Move forward to the next century and my 1GiB of memory is still not enough:)
I am sure the state of New Jersey can tell Sequoia to accept this investigation or say good-bye to any certification. Sequoia is just making themselves look bad and like they have something to hide.
They are "personal" drives as opposed to "enterprise" drives in the sense that the state issued drive has additional features not available to the regular Staples consumer.
Given the proportion of Apache servers to IIS servers on the Internet, I don't think the ~280% difference is that strange. After all, most websites are vandalised through oversights in custom scripting etc., rather than security holes in Apache.
By itself the figure is worthless. On the other hand stats indicating how the sites were compromised would be much more valuable.
Slashdot Mirror
Who don't have any friends.
;)
But you do get to share in a community of readers who never read the news articles or get the wrong end of the stick. I mean this wouldn't be slashdot if we didn't start reacting to the article summary that has little or nothing to do with the referenced article
Basically, I'm advocating the 80/20 way. Make all of the "obvious" and "simple" scenarios easy, and you'll already get a large performance boost with little effort (its already being done...my parallel loop example can easily be done in virtually all languages, and is already used in many places, and it works quite well).
In a number of cases this means getting the API that you use optimised and doing less improvements yourself. For example your average Java developer could probably push a large part of the burden to the classes offered by the JDK. It doesn't mean that they are totally absolved, but since the 20 percent of the code 80 percent of the time, they are calling is usually part of the JDK, that is a good starting point.
The linux drivers for nvidia suck too, nvidia clearly take a long time to get up to speed on new operating systems, it's one reason I no longer use them. Having said that, they're pretty damn solid, so its most likely becuase vistas so mucked up when it comes to drivers.
Are computers fast enough these days to allow for protected memory for drivers? Given that most crashes are from drivers it would be nice, but how this is realistically?
Now that we are seeing more and more in the way of multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU computers I can definitely see parallelism become more important, for task that can be handled this way. You have to remember that in certain cases trying to parallise a task can end up being less efficient, so what you parallelise will depend on the task in hand. Things like games, media application and scientific applications are usually likely candidates since they are either doing lots of different things at once or have tasks that can be split up into smaller units that don't depend on the outcome of the other. Server applications can to a certain extent, depending whether they are trying to the same resources or not (ftp server, accessing this disk, vs a time server which does not file I/O).
One thing that should also be noted, is that in certain cases you will need to accept increased memory usage, since you want to avoid tasks locking on resources that they don't really need to synchronise until the end of the work unit. In this case it may be cheaper to duplicate resources, do the work and then resynchronise at the end. Like everything it depends on the size and duration of the work unit.
Even if your application is not doing enough to warrant running its tasks in parallel, the operating system could benefit, so that applications don't suffer on sharing resources that don't need to be shared.
Hello? Firefox developers, where are you? You already have a reputation for being sluggish. Why sit back and prove it every time? Is gecko so poorly engineered that it's really hard to fix? Or does nobody care about the actual page rendering side of the web browser? Either way is really bad for firefox's future.
Look on the bright side, they are still in front of IE at this point.
Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z : Safari is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%.
Looks like someone wasn't reading what they were writing. The links are right though.
Hardly news considering the article was posted on Oct 12th, 2004!
;)
Who the hell approved this?
This was posted in Cowboy Neal Standard Time (CNST), so time is irrelavant or least not working in the same way you and I expect
Provided you don't include "slick user interface" in the feature set, that's correct.
Its more than just a "slick interface", its about the total package. It feels thought out in both features and design. It isn't necessarily the greatest, but it gets things working well. It doesn't feel like it was intended to be deciphered by techies. Yes it is a bit expensive, but experience shows that if you provide something that feels right people will buy it. The price of the product is not always about the cost of the parts.
I have an iPod, but it wasn't where I was going originally. I have a Mac and looked around for alternatives to the iPod, to avoid being YAIU (Yet Another iPod User). What I found is that few worked well with the Mac, many were clunky in design, and for the feature set I wanted few were actually cheaper.
Screw a subscription model. It is the one thing that would likely make me want to crack the OS as soon as possible. The closest thing to a subscription model I would accept is one like Apple's: they sell an upgraded OS with new features, improvements et al., every year or so for a reasonable price and I get tempted to put my money down.
The problem with a lot of subscription models is that you pay, get the initial copy of the software and then get pissed because its been three years since you got something for your money.
There are subscription models that work, but unfortunately they seem to be the minority.
Yup. In the UK, here, the Data Protection Act makes it legally dubious to put anyone else's data onto Google. Here, there's a responsibilty to protect personal data.
The truth is, if your provider is in a foreign country, then you should expect that the government can do whatever they want with its hardware - this about territory and not constitution. At the same time your own government is probably going make laws which suits themselves about the data you access. How this mess sorts itself out depends on the government of the day. As an individual you just need to remember that things are complicated when your government is involved and more complicated when you also have another government involved. Many people don't think of geography when it comes to the internet, but sometimes it makes itself apparent when politics gets involved.
This reminds me of RIM, since their servers are located in Canada. The French government asked their ministers not use Blackberries, because data was being handled outside of France and therefore outside of French jurisdiction. If RIM had servers in France, then I am sure there would have been more reassurance.
If there is anything you need to be paranoid about, host it yourself!
Looks like there are other potential issues with WiMax and this time it is with satellite reception:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/16/wimax-could-interfere-with-satellite-communications/
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
This is what I thought. Although the author of the article mentioned that they couldn't find an alternative, I would certainly be curious to see if anyone can provide a working alternative, commercial or otherwise. I am sure while 'Meraki' might be larger arse-holes than g**tse.cx, I am sure they would change their approach if there was good competition.
Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is incapable of finding a profit model that suits their needs? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki is retroactively applying their license by updating boxes without notice or consent?
;)
Fond memories of the CueCat come to mind
China is wiping out Tibetan culture at a fast pace, the only leverage the Tibetans have is international pressure, and in the Olympic year China cannot simply ignore it as it would do normally. They have little hope of success, but this is their last chance before their country is swamped by Chinese immigration and they become fringe slum dwellers in their own land.
In an Olympic year China is going to get noticed more and it is going be to be subject to more criticism. It will be interesting to see whether the IOC decides to boycott the games, since this would be a very delicate move: it would wipe out the dreams of a great number of athletes, say that they were wrong for choosing China, yet at the same time make a point.
Given the Chinese mentality of not wanting to "lose face", the more they are pushed the more they are likely to resist.
But then, who in is right mind would admit on /. to running such a thing :)
/. from work" ;)
Just use the classic defence "I was reading
That's where the blame is supposed to be placed. It's not as if Slashdot doesn't constantly get screamed at for the same thing, after all ... but as is usual they failed to get off their lazy asses and verify their postings to make sure the information in them is still correct. This shouldn't have been posted. It's not your fault, but it still shouldn't have been approved/posted.
/. remember ;)
Certainly, but I thought half the approval process was getting people to rant and rave on a non-story. This is
Hmm, I wonder how much weight the bucky balls add to the whole solution. If it does not add too much weight, maybe it could be a solution for future airships. Would have to do some research here.
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
I am also beginning to increasingly believe that if you create a good enough dare, people will take you up on it, just to prove you wrong.
Mother nature likes to join in too sometimes, as one ship has shown us.
I had a BBC Micro, model B, with 32KiB of memory. I started off with a tape drive and the fiddling of the volume on the tape player, before discovering the joys of the floppy disk. Certain applications were installed by adding a new ROM and hoping you didn't break any legs while doing it. My favourite games at that point were Elite, Frak and Repton.
:)
Move forward to the next century and my 1GiB of memory is still not enough
NB The use of 'assload' without the 'metric' qualifier is discouraged, the customary US assload being a much greater mass.
Well don't forget there are also other variations off the metric assload, such as the one used for measuring liquid quantities.
I am sure the state of New Jersey can tell Sequoia to accept this investigation or say good-bye to any certification. Sequoia is just making themselves look bad and like they have something to hide.
They are "personal" drives as opposed to "enterprise" drives in the sense that the state issued drive has additional features not available to the regular Staples consumer.
;)
Like secure finger print verification?
However artistic you want to get with LED lights, just don't hang them around town with black electrical tape ;)
Given the proportion of Apache servers to IIS servers on the Internet, I don't think the ~280% difference is that strange. After all, most websites are vandalised through oversights in custom scripting etc., rather than security holes in Apache.
By itself the figure is worthless. On the other hand stats indicating how the sites were compromised would be much more valuable.
slashdot was missing,too, and unlike google it still is.
Does this mean with we will have to remove Slashdot's Nerd approval rating?