or point it at a lava lamp in order to generate a constant stream of seed data for encryption.
They did this, it used to be on lavarand.sgi.com, but that server is no more. It baically would have a digital image of multiple lava lamps, take the numbers from the digital image, run it rhough some hash like MD5 and then use those as random numbers. Lavarnd.org seems to be the closes spiritual successor.
I don't know if you guys remember, but PayPal started off as a Palm App. It started as a solution for the bane of business lunches - having no money or just $20 bills and having to split, and then having to remember everything. So you could beam folks money adn it would show up in yur account. The problem is synching up the money, what if you reset your Palm before you synch the money to your account (I lost my $5 that way). They quickly realized that the amount of money in splitting a check wasn't as big as the big boy of trying to pay over the Internet, and they switched their model pretty quickly to that, quite successfully I might add.
Hmm, not as available, don't know if I quite agree with that. Yeah, Linux is sold in most comp shops and bookjstores, but they tend to be old. You'd have to update anyway. They're both sold online. The study is for web shops, so I'd hope a company on the web would have a fast link to download the ISO.
The bigger problem I feel is the documentation. Linux is the OS that killed a million trees, there are books upon books for it, and they tend to go from very broad (Linux for Dummies) to the narrow based (the linux 2.2 kernel map, I do everything in user-land, don't need to know the intricacies of the kernel). There's a billion tuning guides. BSD has two or three of any depth, and the guides for tuning it are hard to find. Last time I built a kernel on FreeBSD (4.1, wow, that long ago) there still was a big chunk in the kernel config file that had zero documentation, and a bunch of those were tuning flags.
UNIX using folks can, most administrators if they're sued to UNIX can tell you how easy it is to keep stuff running, even if it isn't always easy to get them running in the first place. But folks used to Microsoft's "it's bundled and has defaults and a GUI so it MUST be easier" tend not to. If boss A hears some underling say "we should go Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD because it's cheaper" the boss is more likely to dismiss it than if someone gives him a detailed study with real numbers instead of seat of the pants guesses.
I subminnted this a month ago, was hoping for front page so I could get some good flame wars^W^Wdiscussions going, sigh...;)
I heard this thing has trouble with potholes and curbs. Anyone have info on this? The website had absolutely zero, just that it will be available with snow tires. I was looking at the specs, it weighs 95 lbs (they call it portable, I'd like to see some 100 pounder try to put it in their trunk) and supposedly it can take a 250lb person and 75 lbs of cargo. I'd love to see what 420lbs crashing down a 4inch curb with essentially zero suspension travel looks like, I'd volunteer for testing that, though I'd wear a mouth guard to stop me biting my tongue off. Even if you stopped and got off to walk the segway off the curb, thats potentially 170 pounds of segway and cargo you have to move up and down a curb. And they say this thing will eventually tow a 300lb capacity trailer? Yikes. Either you and your trailer ride the sidewalk and block half the people, or you ride in the street and dodge cabs. I'd love to see what 700 or so pounds would tax those motors with. And then theirs San Francisco and other hilly cities...
My favorite Segway quote: Many people believe the Segway will revolutionize the ways people get hit by cars. --- Tina Fey, SNL Weekend Update
but the mozilla people have decided that software, the most malleable stuff we can create, should not be adaptable to the user
Not to start a flame war, but there are discussions all over about preferences for this and that, witha hard effort to lessen the amount of thingies stuck in the preferences panel. There's definitely a philophy in some folks that "less is more", pick one way and live with it. Matthew Thomas seems to be an influential GUI dude at Mozilla, you can read some of the debates in his weblog.
I get weird problems trying to run shockwave apps/whatever. ANy shock site makes browser go "poof", no talkback, no annoying Dr Watson stuff neither, just window go bye-bye. Anyone have any ideas?
All Canon has is the biggest sensor that's compatible with 35mm lens systems.
The Contax N1 has the same size one, the cool trick is it's the same size the image area of a 35mm film frame. Meaning that a 50mm lens on this camera has the same effective focal length than on a 35 mm film camera, and not subject to the infamous digital camera multiplier effect. Anyone with a decent investment in lenses, especially wide angle ones, will drool over the sensor size more than the pixel count.
The 300V is the replacement for the Rebel 2000/EOS 300 camera, which is a film camera. I think it's the #1 selling SLR in the world, so it's a big deal for Canon. I got my gf the Rebel 2000, pretty cool.
The best part about this it's a full frame CMOS sensor, meaning it has the same 24mm x 36mm frame size as a 35mm film frame would. Almost all other CMOS sensors (outside of the Contax N1, who$e co$t i$ not an ea$y $um to $ave for) are smaller than the standard 35mm frame. This changes the effective focal length of the lens, making it a longer lens. A 15mm superwide lens on a normal 35mm frame becomes a 22mm effective focal length on say a Canon D60. (As a side effect, because of this, all of the superwide SLR lenses are backordered, mine has been on order almost 2 months, grumble grumble.) Now you can buy a lens for your film camera and have it be exactly the same effective focal length for your digital cam. I have a Canon film SLR, good camera. I like the fact that now there is a decent upgrade path, though it pretty much is a given that this would have happened eventually.
I think you need to differentiate between "souped up" and "I want it to look like this is souped up". Most souped up cars are fairly subtle, don't want to catch any unwanted attention from the cops.
The "rice boyz", the dorks who trick their cars out, do stupid stuff:
Add a huge exhaust pipe when their engine isn't modded. This decreases performance from the increased back pressure. But it he heh, looks cool. Heh... dooood.
Huge spoked rims on drum brakes. No real racer would have drum brakes, too fade prone. Worse is when they paint the drums body color, which infinitessibly hurts performance (more unsprung weight, more rotational inertia) and makes heat dissipation not as efficient, so slightly adds to fading.
The wings, all they do is add drag. Why have on a front wheeel drive car? Pressure is friction, but in a front driver, they don't help much. You'll bite at the back. I guess in some respects it is good, cause it will slow the morons down and give them understeer, so they won't be idiots and fishtail into oncoming traffic.
Super low sidewall tires. They help cornering, but do shit to ride quality. Hope they jar their fillings out.
High colored interiors. Saw one car with a bright yellow interior. Imagine the reflections off that? There's a reason everything in a real car is boring flat black, nothing to distract you.
Hubble space telescope does a lot of this, though its limited in size. Because it doens't have atmospeheric distortions, it's mlearer even with it's relatively small size lens.
More like... <Personal Shill mode>So now you all go out and buy my book and your HTML will be cleaner, 20% whiter, your breath will be fresher, and you'll get this lovely set of steak knives</Personal Shill mode>
The cost of developing and testing drugs is far too high. Companies need to be able to recoup their costs from R&D.
A couple random shots at drug companies, I remember reading these, I didn't look up any hard numbers on these, so take witha grain of salt, or try looking up yourself and not be as lazy as me:
Drug companies tend to spend more on ads than on R & D. That boosts prices.
Most doctors hate drug ads. Some patient sees some expensive drug on TV, tells his doctor "I want this drug", won't listen to doctor when he says this isn't for them. The docs hate the interference in the doctor patient relationship.
There was a drug that was used on livestock (sheep I think), cost a couple pennies per pill, or some cost well under a dollar. Then they found it had some use as an anti-AIDS drug, they then boosted the price to a around 10 bucks a pill for humans, though still keeping the livestock price cheap. I don't know the cost of researchng teh AIDS properties, but I doubt it was enough to justify a 100x price increase. This was for terminal patients, some had no choice but to pay, others took the sheep drugs.
Not a drug company, but a health related company: Bausch and Lomb marketed disposable contacts in a variety of price ranges, from cheap to damn expensive. The thing is they were all exactly the same. They charged people more just to charge them more.
People everywhere can be scum. When you have opaque tech, or opaque enough to the average person (drug companies, car mechanics, OS vendors) you have a better opportunity to be scum.
Mozilla still doesn't seem to have the incremental layout capabilities of Netscape 0.9
"incremental layout" depends a lot on the HTML complexity and the HTML author. you need to define the sizes of layout objects before you can lay out things past them. the IMG WIDTH and HEIGHT tags introduced by netscape helped this a lot, where you can say "hey, I'm blocked on getting this image, but I know what size it will be, so let me render the stuff after it and I'll worry about putting the image in later". Tables and CSS add to the complexity of determining sizes. You never really know the size of a table until after you read the trailing TABLE tag and you may even need to know the sizes of multiple elements inside the table until you load them, so you essentially have to grabthe whole table before you can show anything inside. The state of HTML at the time of Netscape.9 was nothing like it is now, probably at least an order of magnitude simpler. Compare the First early specs of HTML with HTML 4 and that doesn't even include CSS. HTML 2 (which your comparison browser couldn't even render because it was too complex) is a 77 page spec, HTML 4.0 (linked above) is close to 286 pages.
making as many connections as you wanted (later capped at 20) It still does this, defaulted at 4. You can change this in user.js, it's just not a pref you can see in the UI anymore because folks abused it too much, and there definitely is a diminishing returns thing, and mostly - you just don't need to change it. HTTP 1.1 also lessens the need for this, drastically reducing the overhead for small objects, where socket start and teardown time is a much more significant part of the overall time.
These days the thing will freeze as it loads some plugin or other, maybe this is somehow harder than images This is harder, and the memory requirements are huge. You're loadoing a bunch of new code, having to dynamically link stuff all over the palce, establish communication links, allocate memory, a nuch of stuff. The image library is already loaded, and showing an image takes a lot less memory than say, showing a 10 meg shockwave game.
It's hard to make comparisons now, since our browsers are required to do so much more. I tried to look at some old browsers just for the hell of it, and I couldn't even get NCSA Mosaic to run, just blew up on me.
One thing I find missing for C programming is a generally accepted security tool. In the rush to get things out the door with new and whizbang features, little is done on security tools. This is true of both commercial and OpenSource environments. People still use gets, people still take things from the environment unsafely. Taintperl is great, why isn't there TaintC or the equivalent? Why is there not a single tool that has a database of past exploits and knows how to detect at least a subset of these? yes, I realize that a program can never replace a good set of eyes looking at a program, but I also keep my compiler warnings cranked up high to detect "I'm a dumb-ass" mistakes. Why can't we hook this into the optimizer, since it must do lexical and data analysis anyway? Get these mistakes caught early before they get stuck in released in the wild code. Why is sling still such vapor? AFAIK, they still haven't updated lint to work with C++ code yet, we're still in someways in the sticks and stones era of tools for programming.
at one time, NT was on x86, MIPS, and PowerPC. I remember all the "It runs NT" ads for MIPS based comps in teh Ziff-davis rags. I think for NT 3.51 only, then all but Alpha was dropped for NT 4, and then not even alpha was supported past NT4.
Slashdot Mirror
or point it at a lava lamp in order to generate a constant stream of seed data for encryption.
They did this, it used to be on lavarand.sgi.com, but that server is no more. It baically would have a digital image of multiple lava lamps, take the numbers from the digital image, run it rhough some hash like MD5 and then use those as random numbers. Lavarnd.org seems to be the closes spiritual successor.
I don't know if you guys remember, but PayPal started off as a Palm App. It started as a solution for the bane of business lunches - having no money or just $20 bills and having to split, and then having to remember everything. So you could beam folks money adn it would show up in yur account. The problem is synching up the money, what if you reset your Palm before you synch the money to your account (I lost my $5 that way). They quickly realized that the amount of money in splitting a check wasn't as big as the big boy of trying to pay over the Internet, and they switched their model pretty quickly to that, quite successfully I might add.
you will, once you shack in with a gal.
You may be asking a bit much of the typical Slashdot reader...
This gave me a chuckle, sucks about the Offtopic mod. hows that quote go.....
The difference between +1 Funny and -1 Troll is if the moderator gets the joke.
Maybe you could sue them and all UNIXen for having a /dev/null. If someone can sue all domain owners for using the generic term "easy" maybe you have a shot.
Hmm, not as available, don't know if I quite agree with that. Yeah, Linux is sold in most comp shops and bookjstores, but they tend to be old. You'd have to update anyway. They're both sold online. The study is for web shops, so I'd hope a company on the web would have a fast link to download the ISO.
The bigger problem I feel is the documentation. Linux is the OS that killed a million trees, there are books upon books for it, and they tend to go from very broad (Linux for Dummies) to the narrow based (the linux 2.2 kernel map, I do everything in user-land, don't need to know the intricacies of the kernel). There's a billion tuning guides. BSD has two or three of any depth, and the guides for tuning it are hard to find. Last time I built a kernel on FreeBSD (4.1, wow, that long ago) there still was a big chunk in the kernel config file that had zero documentation, and a bunch of those were tuning flags.
UNIX using folks can, most administrators if they're sued to UNIX can tell you how easy it is to keep stuff running, even if it isn't always easy to get them running in the first place. But folks used to Microsoft's "it's bundled and has defaults and a GUI so it MUST be easier" tend not to. If boss A hears some underling say "we should go Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD because it's cheaper" the boss is more likely to dismiss it than if someone gives him a detailed study with real numbers instead of seat of the pants guesses.
;)
I subminnted this a month ago, was hoping for front page so I could get some good flame wars^W^Wdiscussions going, sigh...
They've obsoleted BOB!!!! Noooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!
I heard this thing has trouble with potholes and curbs. Anyone have info on this? The website had absolutely zero, just that it will be available with snow tires. I was looking at the specs, it weighs 95 lbs (they call it portable, I'd like to see some 100 pounder try to put it in their trunk) and supposedly it can take a 250lb person and 75 lbs of cargo. I'd love to see what 420lbs crashing down a 4inch curb with essentially zero suspension travel looks like, I'd volunteer for testing that, though I'd wear a mouth guard to stop me biting my tongue off. Even if you stopped and got off to walk the segway off the curb, thats potentially 170 pounds of segway and cargo you have to move up and down a curb. And they say this thing will eventually tow a 300lb capacity trailer? Yikes. Either you and your trailer ride the sidewalk and block half the people, or you ride in the street and dodge cabs. I'd love to see what 700 or so pounds would tax those motors with. And then theirs San Francisco and other hilly cities...
My favorite Segway quote:
Many people believe the Segway will revolutionize the ways people get hit by cars.
--- Tina Fey, SNL Weekend Update
but the mozilla people have decided that software, the most malleable stuff we can create, should not be adaptable to the user
Not to start a flame war, but there are discussions all over about preferences for this and that, witha hard effort to lessen the amount of thingies stuck in the preferences panel. There's definitely a philophy in some folks that "less is more", pick one way and live with it. Matthew Thomas seems to be an influential GUI dude at Mozilla, you can read some of the debates in his weblog.
I get weird problems trying to run shockwave apps/whatever. ANy shock site makes browser go "poof", no talkback, no annoying Dr Watson stuff neither, just window go bye-bye. Anyone have any ideas?
All Canon has is the biggest sensor that's compatible with 35mm lens systems.
The Contax N1 has the same size one, the cool trick is it's the same size the image area of a 35mm film frame. Meaning that a 50mm lens on this camera has the same effective focal length than on a 35 mm film camera, and not subject to the infamous digital camera multiplier effect. Anyone with a decent investment in lenses, especially wide angle ones, will drool over the sensor size more than the pixel count.
Whats the range of B/W print film? I know it's got a much stronger dynamic range than color print or slide film.
The 300V is the replacement for the Rebel 2000/EOS 300 camera, which is a film camera. I think it's the #1 selling SLR in the world, so it's a big deal for Canon. I got my gf the Rebel 2000, pretty cool.
Man, if I had this pent up I'd be releasing prematurely too!
Releasing prematurely? they have ways to fix that.
The best part about this it's a full frame CMOS sensor, meaning it has the same 24mm x 36mm frame size as a 35mm film frame would. Almost all other CMOS sensors (outside of the Contax N1, who$e co$t i$ not an ea$y $um to $ave for) are smaller than the standard 35mm frame. This changes the effective focal length of the lens, making it a longer lens. A 15mm superwide lens on a normal 35mm frame becomes a 22mm effective focal length on say a Canon D60. (As a side effect, because of this, all of the superwide SLR lenses are backordered, mine has been on order almost 2 months, grumble grumble.) Now you can buy a lens for your film camera and have it be exactly the same effective focal length for your digital cam. I have a Canon film SLR, good camera. I like the fact that now there is a decent upgrade path, though it pretty much is a given that this would have happened eventually.
The "rice boyz", the dorks who trick their cars out, do stupid stuff:
Hubble space telescope does a lot of this, though its limited in size. Because it doens't have atmospeheric distortions, it's mlearer even with it's relatively small size lens.
More like ...
<Personal Shill mode>So now you all go out and buy my book and your HTML will be cleaner, 20% whiter, your breath will be fresher, and you'll get this lovely set of steak knives</Personal Shill mode>
"The best thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from."
A couple random shots at drug companies, I remember reading these, I didn't look up any hard numbers on these, so take witha grain of salt, or try looking up yourself and not be as lazy as me:
People everywhere can be scum. When you have opaque tech, or opaque enough to the average person (drug companies, car mechanics, OS vendors) you have a better opportunity to be scum.
Mozilla still doesn't seem to have the incremental layout capabilities of Netscape 0.9
.9 was nothing like it is now, probably at least an order of magnitude simpler. Compare the First early specs of HTML with HTML 4 and that doesn't even include CSS. HTML 2 (which your comparison browser couldn't even render because it was too complex) is a 77 page spec, HTML 4.0 (linked above) is close to 286 pages.
"incremental layout" depends a lot on the HTML complexity and the HTML author. you need to define the sizes of layout objects before you can lay out things past them. the IMG WIDTH and HEIGHT tags introduced by netscape helped this a lot, where you can say "hey, I'm blocked on getting this image, but I know what size it will be, so let me render the stuff after it and I'll worry about putting the image in later". Tables and CSS add to the complexity of determining sizes. You never really know the size of a table until after you read the trailing TABLE tag and you may even need to know the sizes of multiple elements inside the table until you load them, so you essentially have to grabthe whole table before you can show anything inside. The state of HTML at the time of Netscape
making as many connections as you wanted (later capped at 20)
It still does this, defaulted at 4. You can change this in user.js, it's just not a pref you can see in the UI anymore because folks abused it too much, and there definitely is a diminishing returns thing, and mostly - you just don't need to change it. HTTP 1.1 also lessens the need for this, drastically reducing the overhead for small objects, where socket start and teardown time is a much more significant part of the overall time.
These days the thing will freeze as it loads some plugin or other, maybe this is somehow harder than images
This is harder, and the memory requirements are huge. You're loadoing a bunch of new code, having to dynamically link stuff all over the palce, establish communication links, allocate memory, a nuch of stuff. The image library is already loaded, and showing an image takes a lot less memory than say, showing a 10 meg shockwave game.
It's hard to make comparisons now, since our browsers are required to do so much more. I tried to look at some old browsers just for the hell of it, and I couldn't even get NCSA Mosaic to run, just blew up on me.
practices of the Great Stan of Redmond.
Does he hang with the great Kyle, Kenny and Eric Cartman of Redmond? BEEFCAKE!!
One thing I find missing for C programming is a generally accepted security tool. In the rush to get things out the door with new and whizbang features, little is done on security tools. This is true of both commercial and OpenSource environments. People still use gets, people still take things from the environment unsafely. Taintperl is great, why isn't there TaintC or the equivalent? Why is there not a single tool that has a database of past exploits and knows how to detect at least a subset of these? yes, I realize that a program can never replace a good set of eyes looking at a program, but I also keep my compiler warnings cranked up high to detect "I'm a dumb-ass" mistakes. Why can't we hook this into the optimizer, since it must do lexical and data analysis anyway? Get these mistakes caught early before they get stuck in released in the wild code. Why is sling still such vapor? AFAIK, they still haven't updated lint to work with C++ code yet, we're still in someways in the sticks and stones era of tools for programming.
And no flame wars on language choice, please.
at one time, NT was on x86, MIPS, and PowerPC. I remember all the "It runs NT" ads for MIPS based comps in teh Ziff-davis rags. I think for NT 3.51 only, then all but Alpha was dropped for NT 4, and then not even alpha was supported past NT4.
I may be wrong...