If you find a bug in some commerical software, you report the bug to the vendor and they fix it. Depending on the support contract this takes on average one week (At least it does if you are using the software the company I work for supply).
Really? Within a week? When I was working as a programmer, I was fixing bugs reported three years ago. Most bugfixes were in the next release, and we released every 6 month. Only exception were bugs where the production actually stopped due to errors.
Like the genre of Multi Player Online Games? As far as I know the first successful games in the genre with the possible exception of Habitat (and descendants) were all open source.
Those arguments are called "job " in Germany. (of course the Germans actually use the equivalent german words).
The interesting thing is: Those arguments "If you do X, we will loose Y jobs" never ask, how many jobs will be slashed if the governement won't do X. Take steel tariffs for instance: How many jobs suffered because steel tariffs increased the steel prices for american companies? There was a calculation for the effect of steel tariffs back in the Reagen era to job count. Even though those tariffs saved about 55,000 jobs at the steel companies, the steel consuming industries like car makers slashed 130,000 jobs at the same time because of the increased costs for steel.
So if you are confronted with a similar argument in a dispute, just ask your opponent, how many jobs would be hurt by the increased costs for the following parts of the economy chain.
If you just want plaintext lossy compressed to be smaller than the original, then take out interpunctation;) Without all those colons and periods your compressed file is slightly smaller as the original, and the original can't be fully restored:)
Re:Groklaw wants a reason?
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yes... because the contract states in 4.16(b) that SCO can't waive any rights of licensees without asking Novell for permissions. So technically the AIX license of IBM they have waived is still intact because Novell didn't agree. (See GROKLAW as a reference.)
"But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway"
Did you know that you can add words to the default dictionary and actually download specialized dictionaries?
I know... but you know, it's not much fun to add for instance all czech towns to the dictionary because I happen to write about my walking tours there (did you know by the way that it is impossible in Word to have german umlauts and czech accents in the same text? Only way to work around I discovered so far is writing the text in HTML with an ASCII editor and then import it into Word. Yes, it matters, if your mother is working for the Bruecke-Most-Foundation, a czech-german institution). And no, there is no specialized dictionary containing german, czech and polish towns together. But I happen to be grown up at the place where all three countries have common borders. Then there is no saxon dictionary I know of. But my home dialect is saxon. And I like to play with the different pronounciation between german and saxon.
So far for the private conversation. And at work: I do technical documentation at an university. I have to edit texts in german and english. Sometimes I have both languages in the same document. I have lots of identifiers, product specific and often wildly stung together words to use. If I would use activated spellchecking I wasted more time by adding words than the correctly corrected words (nice paradoxon btw: incorrectly corrected) would save me. Not to mention the fact that you may accidently add the word misspelled, and then fight with the dictionary to accept only the corrected version. I once had the idea that maybe if I would endure it for about one or two month, my dictionary would fill up with the words I use and finally it would actually help me. After six month I gave up and deactivated spellchecking. Every project comes with new words, and the old just get into the way.
"When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP"
Hey, I'll bet you love Pine, yes?
I grew up with ELM, thanks for asking;) Currently I am using mulberry and thunderbird. But I still love telnet smtphost 25 as my MTA.
My point is, many of the "features" that you don't like are enabled because most people *do* like them, but that does not mean you can't take a few minutes to configure Word the way you like.
Yes. By disactivating Word and using an HTML editor for formatted text. I have never worked at an institution which didn't accept HTML formatted documents even though there were strict guidelines to use MS Office. Obviously nobody noticed. Those institutions include KPMG and Deutsche Bank.
In fact Excel is the only part of MS Office that is really good:) And Visio has an unrivalled number of stencils for it, so all line drawing monkeys (like me) are using it.
For all other parts of MS Office (Word, Access, PowerPoint) I prefer other solutions. And I especially hate MS's spellchecking. Because I am fighting with it until I have it switched off. It is good for nothing to me. But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway. And the nagging feature of correcting words starting with two uppercase letters always gets into the way while writing program or other technical documentation. Basicly everytime I try to adapt spellchecking to my needs I end up with having all features switched off.
When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP. So Outlook is a piece of bloat to me, and Exchange features are just there to be set wrong and creating havoc.:)
The courts in Massachusetts are trying to legalize gay marriage across the entire country. They aren't elected officials, they don't even have to pretend to care what the people think.
The U.S. Constitution has also some legal stuff in it most people would vote against if it would affect only other people. The courts in Massachusetts basicly told the people that they don't have the right to forbid gay marriage, because that would be unconstitional. Gay marriage for most americans affects other people, so it's a good thing to them to forbid it. They would think otherwise if it would be about their own children.
So there is a difference between "what the people think" and "what the people think about other people". Keep that in mind.
Re:Why wouldn't math be known across the universe?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 4, Interesting
With just adding and subtracting you get something called 'constructive Mathematics'. It's a subset of Mathematics, and it's missing some important axioms necessary for quite usual things like calculus (nonexistance of a supreme for any limited set of numbers) and algebra (no selection axiom, thus you can't prove that infinite dimensional vector fields have a base).
Promotion is something you don't need a music industry for. There are lots of promotion agencies happy to help you which don't ask you to sell your soul. And production cost was included into my "initial cost" approach (when I was talking of 'creating the print plates' and 'proofreading').
But the cost of production stays about the same, if you are hand copying your work (by performing it at a stage) or if you are recording it in a studio. (Yes I know, this is not entirely true... but you get the point.)
What bad economics and planning would that be? Creating a product and then selling it? The only reason the entertainment industry is having trouble right now is because their product is easy to steal!
Your argument falls somewhat short. The only reason that the entertainment industry exists in the first place is that it was expensive to start copying, but once you got it running, you could put out many copies very cheap.
So when stuff like the printing press was invented and used, suddenly the burdensome path of copying books, music and other creative works by hand was obsolete. Once you had the work in your printing press, you could generate hundreds of copies. But the investition in the actual press, in generating the plates for printing and proofreading were expensive, so many artist couldn't afford that themselves. So they couldn't get their own work out to earn money, because they couldn't afford the initial costs necessary to start copying, thus forcing them to get other people to invest into them.
Without legal protection of their work they didn't even had a chance to sell their work to the printing press operator, because all he needed was a single copy to create the printing plates. This put the artist out of the revenue stream for his own work. Many countries had regulations in place to stop this, mostly by forcing the artist to register his work with a royal office of Arts or something similar, and this office then protected the artist from illicit copies, but on the other hand the royal office now could censor the work by not allowing anyone to copy it or not accepting the work in the first place.
Copyright (or Author's right according to the Berne Convention) was deviced to give the control of the work back to the author, who was still forced to sell rights to his work to printing press operators (because buying a printing press was still expensive). It took some time until Copyright was available to non-citizens. Charles Dickens for instance was never able to stop U.S. printers to sell his books, because U.S. Copyright law at this time was only protecting U.S. citizens. It wasn't until american authors themselves were trying to sell their works outside of U.S. (namely Samuel Langhorne Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain) until the U.S. agreed to protect non-citizen works in reverse for protection of U.S. works outside the U.S.
The same situation came up with all developing countries which weren't very keen at protecting copyright from other countries until they had enough own works to protect abroad which made it worthwile to give protection to outlanders in exchange (think Japan in the early 20th century, Taiwan in the 70ies). This makes one wonder if it makes sense at all to force third world countries to enforce copyright at all. No one playing catchup in the last 150 years was protecting copyright until he reached a certain level himself;)
Back to the music industry. It has only one big selling point for artists: It can help to overcome the initial costs to spread the work and thus guaranteering a revenue stream back to the artist. There is no other actual unique service the music industry is providing to the artist. All other services could also be provided by a personal agent which gets a share of the revenue or a fixed salary or whatever.
The music industry is also a service provider to the music listener: In an ideal world it helps the music listener to find music according to his taste and his purchasing power, preselect, finetune and in other ways improve the listening experience. Basicly it is acting as an agent between artist and listener.
But both of those roles are loosing its importance to the music world. Copying costs near to nothing to nearly everyone, so the initial costs for an artist to spread the work is approaching zero. This makes the big selling point of music industry services to the artist void. All it has left is the additional services (connections, career counselling...), which could be bo
You don't even need 32 bit on a desktop. All you need is a processor capable of calculating one bit at a time and the three instructions INC(rease register), DEC(rease register) and JIZ (Jump If Result is Zero). Such a computer is called Turing Complete and able to emulate the behaviour of all other computers.
There are only few applications for the normal desktop user yet which need 64bit computing, because there were no 64bit computers on a normal user's desktop. Everything in need of the increased memory address space, memory bandwith and additional registers was released only for 64bit workstations and servers because it wasn't able to run reasonably on 32bit.
But it doesn't mean that there are no applications for 64bit. And even though you may not use those applications in the next future doesn't mean other people won't use them too.
Look at cars: There are people driving so carefully and only on dry roads that they never even trigger the Anti Lock System of the brakes. Shall car makers now stop putting Anti Lock in stock cars, because there may people out there not needing it? Most people out there driving alone in their cars. Why don't we see hundreds and thousands of single seated cars? Speed limit on roads in the U.S. is (with some exceptions) at 75mph. Why do virtually all cars sold in the U.S. far exceed those limits? You won't ever need the speed.
It has to do with something called economics of scale. If you develop a product, you don't just consider the absolute average use. You look at the extremes, and if you can meet extreme specifications without increasing costs too much, you have a better platform, you can penetrate markets you won't reach with putting out products only for the average user.
You can share your development costs to more potential buyers thus limit the price burden you have to put on each buyer. If development of a limited product for 100 people costs you $1mio, you have to charge each buyer $10,000 to get your money back. If development for an allpurpose product costs you $10mio, and you sell it to 1mio buyers, each one pays you $10 for development. And computers are the products with the widest possible range of uses since the wheel.
Products need builtin reserves to meet future demands and be able to adapt to new uses. Otherwise you end up with hundreds of little platforms each designed for a small target group, expensive to maintain and barely manageable.
If putting out a 64bit platform will cost you only a little more than designing the next 32bit platform, why maintain both a 32bit and a 64bit product line? You can use the 64bit technology for both, thus making the 32bit obsolete. You now cover a large range of uses from servers crunching through Terabytes of data down to cash registers summing up $7.99, $0.50 and $3.99 in a small gift shop with only a single technology. Every improvement at one end is available through your whole product line without additional cost. Even though the cash register at a little store will never encounter numbers outside the 0 - 1mio range, why make the additional effort to design a custom 20bit processor for cash registers, if a stock 32bit processor will do too? Why artificially limit your computer to 32bit registers, if 64bit registers are available at reasonable prices?
Second, as the article said, it's a lot of work on the part of the spammer. They'd have to send out thousands of messages to each target to "sniff them out" and most of those wouldn't even be effective since most of them would be caught by filters and those few that got through very few would load the HTML bugs to identify themselves.
This is exactly the point. Most of the spam examples will die out because they have an ineffective collection of non spam words. But a few will survive and you now can train an own Bayesian filter which collects the versions of spam that generated webbug hits. After a while some words will shine prominently in your Bayesian filter database for being very effective at slipping through Bayesian spam filters.
Basicly you a fighting the dote with itself. And yes. You can automate the process. Just take your everyday spam (penis enlargement, unsecured credit, Nigerian business opportunities...), take a dictionary and then randomly mix dictionary words into your spam messages and send them out to your email database. Create a website to get the webbug hits and associate every spam message with a hash of the random dictionary words to identify successful sets of anti spam words.
I've never been blinded by the sun glinting off a pile of sugar, but I sure have when it glinted off the bumper of my '84 Buick tank.
Go to White Sands, NM;)
It's a gypsum desert, purely white (ok, ok. It's calcium sulfate, so it's not as bright as titanium dioxide, but there are no titanium dioxide deserts I am aware of).
When I was there in summer (115 F/46C in the non existant shadows!) I had to actually hold my hand below my eyes to see anything, and usual sunglasses wouldn't have helped because they don't shadow the eyes from light coming in from below.
The main difference between white and mirror is that the mirror reflects the sunlight beam in a single direction, and if the mirror has an optical albedo of 0,9 (90% of the visual light gets reflected), you look at 90% of the full sunlight if the reflection of the sunlight hits your eye (which is quite bright), but you get barely anything at other angles (just the reflection of the general brightness of the surroundings).
A white surface doesn't necessarily keep the light beam parallel, so you see a bright surface from a very large angle. A white surface with an optical albedo of 0,99 (only 1% of the visual light gets sucked in and turned into infrared) can be calculated as a new light source, which emits nearly all of the incoming light according to its own characteristics. That means that the light you receive from it depends on the angle you look at it and the distance you have from it. But because the white surface emits the light in different directions, you will never get the full intensity of 99% at a single point, and the intensity decreases further with the square of the distance (if you double your distance to the surface you get a quarter of the intensity).
So even if a white surface may be 10 times more effective as a mirror (with 1% light loss in reflection vs. 10% light loss in reflection), from a certain point the mirror will look brighter: If you stand directly in the reflected light beam.
(Those different properties of reemitting received light are wellknown to the computer graphic specialists, because both effects they get handled differently: For mostly reflecting surfaces like mirrors and polished things ray tracing is a quite good model to calculate the light impression, for matte surfaces like stones, wood and walls radiosity yields better results.)
(PS: Those albedo numbers are made up, but they shouldn't be far away from reality).
Re:Why is NAT a "bad thing"?
on
The State of IPv6
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine you are standing in your favourite supermarket, and you wonder if you should buy eggs, because you want to bake a cake for the weekend. With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home. With a 10.* IP address you can't.
Think about what an address is good for: to address something. Giving it an unique identifier, so your request goes to the right place. There are definitely more than 2^32 objects in the world to be addressed. Think about embedding phone numbers in IP, as necessary with all the gimmicky mobile phones. I guess the phone numbers alone exhaust the IPv4 space.
Think about people on aircrafts, if you could reach them because every flight seat has its own address (no need to go to the tower, speak to the pilot, sending the stewardess...) Think about utilities remotely querying the counters for electricity, water, gas and heating in each home. Of course a single utility could use 10.* addresses, but what if there is a merger? Or the billing gets outsourced to another company?
Think about computer management, where every device (processor, harddrive, usb port, monitor...) has its own address, no need to fiddle around with nonstandard SNMP extensions, just query the device directly.
Think about giving every postal address an IPv6 address, thus improving the automatical sorting at the postal services. People don't need to know the actual IPv6 address themselves, let the postal guys do the "DNS";)
NAT is fine for a network with a few hosts and hundreds of clients, because the clients initiate the request. NAT is unusable in any environment, where you have lots of little servers and services, which are just listening for requests.
Because the previous poster talked about using brute force. Brute force to me means: Don't use any structural information you have, just try every possibility. And if you don't know anything about the key beside the fact that it has 1024 bits, you end up with 2^1024 keys to evaluate.
Of course a more sophisticated way would have been to use only the prime numbers between 1 and 2^1024 (If the algorithm were RSA). But a) that's not completely brute force and b) to get all prime numbers you could use brute force again (to evaluate Prim(x) divide x by all y x, for which Prim(y) = TRUE.)
On the other hand the previous poster claimed ALL encryption could be broken by using brute force and given enough time. And all I wanted to show is that this claim, while it holds true in a mathematical sense is quite theoretical.
But if you can chuck all electrons of the world on it (about 10^91) and every electron is swinging with 10^15Hz, and every swing allows you to do a Yes-No-decision, you have a number cruncher that can check about 10^106 bits a second. If your key is 1024 bits long, you can check about 10^103 keys every second. There are 2^1024 different 1024 bit keys out there (about 10^320), so you need about 10^217 seconds to exhaust the key space with brute force, if you have the whole universe working as a big computer for you. A year has a little more than 30 Mio seconds, so your world computer needs 10^209 years for the task, give or take about a factor of 100 maybe. 10^211 years, 10^207 years, what's the difference anyway?:) Our current universe is about 15 billion years old, so if you had 10^197 parallel universes, and you started at the Big Bang, you may be ready with brute force by now.
Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place...
I do believe that you are showing your rich-world blindness with the two contradictory statements above. In the USA, citizens are conditioned to believe that money is no object when developing new technology.
This is the weakest point in the entire American perspective of the world and will in the not too distant future lead to the revision of their status in the world.
First: I am not an american citizen, thanks for asking;)
Second: In my post I was argueing differently: If you don't have a working net of high speed transport in place, consisting of autobahns and roads for individual traffic, a rail network for short and mid distances, and several airports for the long ones, and you have to build the whole infrastructure anyway, then the initial building cost for Maglev trains look quite different. In this case you can't leverage the existing infrastructure for the other traffic systems, because it is virtually nonexistant.
So EVERY new traffic system comes with the same high obstacles you have with Maglevs, with the possible exception for roads, autobahns and busses, because they also operate in the existing environment of ways and narrow paths, even though quite badly. That's why most developping countries have a vast system of bus networks, taxis and the strange interbreed of both, the community taxis. That are 7 to 15 seated vans travelling fixed ways, but without a general schedule and dedicated stops. They often have a sign telling which direction they travel, and you just wave to them to have them stopping so you can board them. The driver will also agree to use a side road if everyone on board agrees and if it fits better to your needs. Prices are higher than regular busses, but lower than the individual taxis. (I've seen and used those community taxis in several countries, and the principle is the same everywhere.)
Third: The fact that the first commercial high speed Maglev was build in China, proves my point. China's economy is strong enough to yield the capital needed for a Maglev implementation, but the current traffic system needs a vast expansion to adapt to the development.
The Transrapid system doesn't use superconductioning, and the first running test versions were open to the public 20 years ago. I remember having a sticker of the Transrapid 06 at my cupboard, when I was a child. The main setback for the Transrapid are the enormous building costs. So Germany went for upgrading its rail system to 250-300 kph (160-190 mph) instead of investing in Transrapid tracks.
There are many advantages for Transrapid tracks:
Steep slopes: Transrapid trains can easily climb 6 to 10 percent slopes (6-10ft height difference on 100ft), because the magnets are strong enough to pull the train up and there is no limit posed by the rail-wheel contact.
Small curves: The Transrapid train can travel in curves with 2km (1,3mls) radius at 200 kph (130mph), in curves with 2,5km (1,6mls) with 250 kph (160mph), because the track can be slanted up to 12 degrees. Normal rail tracks can't use those slants, because you have always to consider the possibility, that a train may have to stop there.
The track doesn't need much space of the landscape, because it runs mostly on pylons. You have to found those pylons every 100-200m (300-600ft), but you don't cut the landscape in half as with traditional tracks. People and animals can roam freely around the track.
With the above cited properties you can build Transrapid tracks in densely settled environments like cities and thus build the train stations in the town centers. So you don't need to provide extra means to get to the stations, quite different than with airports, which consume much space and thus need to be built outside the towns.
With all those advantages: Why don't we have plenty of Transrapid tracks?
There are two principal answers:
Maglev trains like the Transrapid are VERY expensive to build. Basicly the whole track is a continious bridge, this makes the construction not even cheap. Switches between tracks are even more complicated, Transrapid for instance uses a 250m long steel frame which can be bended over the full length to provide smooth connections from one track to the next.
Maglev trains are yet another infrastructure completely independend from the existing infrastructures for roads, tracks, rivers, channels and airports. You can't use anything already existing, you have to start completely anew. That means even for a single relation you have to put a complete chain of constructions in place, starting from power substations and tracks to maintenance buildings and passenger access. This makes the initial investions high without guaranteering an early return on investment. It also means that in the beginning without a complete net of relations the passengers have to use at least one other transport system for their travel, thus making it necessary to connect to the existing transportation infrastructure.
Maglev trains fill a very small ecological niche fitting inbetween conventional trains and airplanes. To get a sufficient amount of revenue you have to look at potential relations that are insufficiently served by current systems, where the conventional systems can't simply be expanded. The Pudong-Shanghai relation was such an example: The busses and cabs are at their capacity limit due to traffic jams, a conventional train was not available for the whole distance, and it was not easy to connect the old train tracks to the town center.
Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place, especially if airports and rail tracks are missing. Here you could put a system in place that serves both: commuter traffic and long distance travel. It would be more expensive than conventional trains. But it will be much cheaper than trains+airports, and sooner or later you will need both of them.
Then you have the next issue: In Germany we have two big providers which host virtually the majority of all german sites (*.de) and a lot of *.com and *.org too. (Yes, *.de is the third largest toplevel domain, larger than *.org...)
Most of those domains are hosted via a large cluster of linux machines at the one provider, or via a SUN cluster at the other. We are not talking about a few hundred of domains, we are talking about more than a million each (and another million on "dedicated servers", "virtual servers" and what more products they have...)
So how do you count those big clusters fairly and unbiased? One each, because they are basicly one system each? Number of IPs? This can change every day, when they add new machines or remove old ones. DNS is doing round-robin to loadbalance the domains onto the IPs, so there is no 1:n mapping of IPs and domainnames, more an m:n. Importance and traffic to those sites? They have everything from vanity sites and "Here's my CV" up to online shops, and even some towns and villages have their sites hosted at those clusters, so where is the limit?
There is just no easy answer how to calculate a market share of servers. Because what the servers are serving is too different.
Wafers are produced as slices from long, round silicium blocks. They have this form because that's the way they come out of the zone heating ovens used to purify the silicium and melt out all the atoms you don't want on the chip. Non silicium atoms cause defects in the crystalline structure because of different size and number of electrons in the shell.
That's one of the issues with 300mm wafers (where 300mm refers to about one foot in diameter): The silicium blocks are wider in diameter, thus needing larger zone heating ovens, thus more energy evenly distributed over the whole zone. If the energy isn't exact the right one in the melting zone, the wrong atoms get out.
The purified silicium blocks then get sawed into thin slices. Larger slices are more prone to breaking during the handling, another issue to overcome while going to larger wafer sizes. They have larger surfaces which could be scratched or damaged.
On the other hand: Once you have the whole process running, you get more chips from the same area;)
Slashdot Mirror
If you find a bug in some commerical software, you report the bug to the vendor and they fix it. Depending on the support contract this takes on average one week (At least it does if you are using the software the company I work for supply).
Really? Within a week? When I was working as a programmer, I was fixing bugs reported three years ago. Most bugfixes were in the next release, and we released every 6 month. Only exception were bugs where the production actually stopped due to errors.
Like the genre of Multi Player Online Games? As far as I know the first successful games in the genre with the possible exception of Habitat (and descendants) were all open source.
Those arguments are called "job " in Germany. (of course the Germans actually use the equivalent german words).
The interesting thing is: Those arguments "If you do X, we will loose Y jobs" never ask, how many jobs will be slashed if the governement won't do X. Take steel tariffs for instance: How many jobs suffered because steel tariffs increased the steel prices for american companies? There was a calculation for the effect of steel tariffs back in the Reagen era to job count. Even though those tariffs saved about 55,000 jobs at the steel companies, the steel consuming industries like car makers slashed 130,000 jobs at the same time because of the increased costs for steel.
So if you are confronted with a similar argument in a dispute, just ask your opponent, how many jobs would be hurt by the increased costs for the following parts of the economy chain.
If you just want plaintext lossy compressed to be smaller than the original, then take out interpunctation ;) Without all those colons and periods your compressed file is slightly smaller as the original, and the original can't be fully restored :)
Yes... because the contract states in 4.16(b) that SCO can't waive any rights of licensees without asking Novell for permissions. So technically the AIX license of IBM they have waived is still intact because Novell didn't agree. (See GROKLAW as a reference.)
Do something useful... figure out lossy compression for plaintext...
Quite easy: Interpret plaintext as graphic data and compress it with JPEG.
"But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway"
;) Currently I am using mulberry and thunderbird. But I still love telnet smtphost 25 as my MTA.
Did you know that you can add words to the default dictionary and actually download specialized dictionaries?
I know... but you know, it's not much fun to add for instance all czech towns to the dictionary because I happen to write about my walking tours there (did you know by the way that it is impossible in Word to have german umlauts and czech accents in the same text? Only way to work around I discovered so far is writing the text in HTML with an ASCII editor and then import it into Word. Yes, it matters, if your mother is working for the Bruecke-Most-Foundation, a czech-german institution). And no, there is no specialized dictionary containing german, czech and polish towns together. But I happen to be grown up at the place where all three countries have common borders. Then there is no saxon dictionary I know of. But my home dialect is saxon. And I like to play with the different pronounciation between german and saxon.
So far for the private conversation. And at work: I do technical documentation at an university. I have to edit texts in german and english. Sometimes I have both languages in the same document. I have lots of identifiers, product specific and often wildly stung together words to use. If I would use activated spellchecking I wasted more time by adding words than the correctly corrected words (nice paradoxon btw: incorrectly corrected) would save me. Not to mention the fact that you may accidently add the word misspelled, and then fight with the dictionary to accept only the corrected version. I once had the idea that maybe if I would endure it for about one or two month, my dictionary would fill up with the words I use and finally it would actually help me. After six month I gave up and deactivated spellchecking. Every project comes with new words, and the old just get into the way.
"When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP"
Hey, I'll bet you love Pine, yes?
I grew up with ELM, thanks for asking
My point is, many of the "features" that you don't like are enabled because most people *do* like them, but that does not mean you can't take a few minutes to configure Word the way you like.
Yes. By disactivating Word and using an HTML editor for formatted text. I have never worked at an institution which didn't accept HTML formatted documents even though there were strict guidelines to use MS Office. Obviously nobody noticed.
Those institutions include KPMG and Deutsche Bank.
In fact Excel is the only part of MS Office that is really good :) And Visio has an unrivalled number of stencils for it, so all line drawing monkeys (like me) are using it.
:)
For all other parts of MS Office (Word, Access, PowerPoint) I prefer other solutions. And I especially hate MS's spellchecking. Because I am fighting with it until I have it switched off. It is good for nothing to me. But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway. And the nagging feature of correcting words starting with two uppercase letters always gets into the way while writing program or other technical documentation. Basicly everytime I try to adapt spellchecking to my needs I end up with having all features switched off.
When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP. So Outlook is a piece of bloat to me, and Exchange features are just there to be set wrong and creating havoc.
The courts in Massachusetts are trying to legalize gay marriage across the entire country. They aren't elected officials, they don't even have to pretend to care what the people think.
The U.S. Constitution has also some legal stuff in it most people would vote against if it would affect only other people. The courts in Massachusetts basicly told the people that they don't have the right to forbid gay marriage, because that would be unconstitional. Gay marriage for most americans affects other people, so it's a good thing to them to forbid it. They would think otherwise if it would be about their own children.
So there is a difference between "what the people think" and "what the people think about other people". Keep that in mind.
With just adding and subtracting you get something called 'constructive Mathematics'. It's a subset of Mathematics, and it's missing some important axioms necessary for quite usual things like calculus (nonexistance of a supreme for any limited set of numbers) and algebra (no selection axiom, thus you can't prove that infinite dimensional vector fields have a base).
Promotion is something you don't need a music industry for. There are lots of promotion agencies happy to help you which don't ask you to sell your soul. And production cost was included into my "initial cost" approach (when I was talking of 'creating the print plates' and 'proofreading').
But the cost of production stays about the same, if you are hand copying your work (by performing it at a stage) or if you are recording it in a studio. (Yes I know, this is not entirely true... but you get the point.)
North coast. For sure. But I am not sure if Northwest or Northeast ;)
What bad economics and planning would that be? Creating a product and then selling it? The only reason the entertainment industry is having trouble right now is because their product is easy to steal!
;)
Your argument falls somewhat short. The only reason that the entertainment industry exists in the first place is that it was expensive to start copying, but once you got it running, you could put out many copies very cheap.
So when stuff like the printing press was invented and used, suddenly the burdensome path of copying books, music and other creative works by hand was obsolete. Once you had the work in your printing press, you could generate hundreds of copies. But the investition in the actual press, in generating the plates for printing and proofreading were expensive, so many artist couldn't afford that themselves. So they couldn't get their own work out to earn money, because they couldn't afford the initial costs necessary to start copying, thus forcing them to get other people to invest into them.
Without legal protection of their work they didn't even had a chance to sell their work to the printing press operator, because all he needed was a single copy to create the printing plates. This put the artist out of the revenue stream for his own work. Many countries had regulations in place to stop this, mostly by forcing the artist to register his work with a royal office of Arts or something similar, and this office then protected the artist from illicit copies, but on the other hand the royal office now could censor the work by not allowing anyone to copy it or not accepting the work in the first place.
Copyright (or Author's right according to the Berne Convention) was deviced to give the control of the work back to the author, who was still forced to sell rights to his work to printing press operators (because buying a printing press was still expensive). It took some time until Copyright was available to non-citizens. Charles Dickens for instance was never able to stop U.S. printers to sell his books, because U.S. Copyright law at this time was only protecting U.S. citizens. It wasn't until american authors themselves were trying to sell their works outside of U.S. (namely Samuel Langhorne Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain) until the U.S. agreed to protect non-citizen works in reverse for protection of U.S. works outside the U.S.
The same situation came up with all developing countries which weren't very keen at protecting copyright from other countries until they had enough own works to protect abroad which made it worthwile to give protection to outlanders in exchange (think Japan in the early 20th century, Taiwan in the 70ies). This makes one wonder if it makes sense at all to force third world countries to enforce copyright at all. No one playing catchup in the last 150 years was protecting copyright until he reached a certain level himself
Back to the music industry. It has only one big selling point for artists: It can help to overcome the initial costs to spread the work and thus guaranteering a revenue stream back to the artist. There is no other actual unique service the music industry is providing to the artist. All other services could also be provided by a personal agent which gets a share of the revenue or a fixed salary or whatever.
The music industry is also a service provider to the music listener: In an ideal world it helps the music listener to find music according to his taste and his purchasing power, preselect, finetune and in other ways improve the listening experience. Basicly it is acting as an agent between artist and listener.
But both of those roles are loosing its importance to the music world. Copying costs near to nothing to nearly everyone, so the initial costs for an artist to spread the work is approaching zero. This makes the big selling point of music industry services to the artist void. All it has left is the additional services (connections, career counselling...), which could be bo
You don't even need 32 bit on a desktop. All you need is a processor capable of calculating one bit at a time and the three instructions INC(rease register), DEC(rease register) and JIZ (Jump If Result is Zero). Such a computer is called Turing Complete and able to emulate the behaviour of all other computers.
There are only few applications for the normal desktop user yet which need 64bit computing, because there were no 64bit computers on a normal user's desktop. Everything in need of the increased memory address space, memory bandwith and additional registers was released only for 64bit workstations and servers because it wasn't able to run reasonably on 32bit.
But it doesn't mean that there are no applications for 64bit. And even though you may not use those applications in the next future doesn't mean other people won't use them too.
Look at cars: There are people driving so carefully and only on dry roads that they never even trigger the Anti Lock System of the brakes. Shall car makers now stop putting Anti Lock in stock cars, because there may people out there not needing it? Most people out there driving alone in their cars. Why don't we see hundreds and thousands of single seated cars? Speed limit on roads in the U.S. is (with some exceptions) at 75mph. Why do virtually all cars sold in the U.S. far exceed those limits? You won't ever need the speed.
It has to do with something called economics of scale. If you develop a product, you don't just consider the absolute average use. You look at the extremes, and if you can meet extreme specifications without increasing costs too much, you have a better platform, you can penetrate markets you won't reach with putting out products only for the average user.
You can share your development costs to more potential buyers thus limit the price burden you have to put on each buyer. If development of a limited product for 100 people costs you $1mio, you have to charge each buyer $10,000 to get your money back. If development for an allpurpose product costs you $10mio, and you sell it to 1mio buyers, each one pays you $10 for development. And computers are the products with the widest possible range of uses since the wheel.
Products need builtin reserves to meet future demands and be able to adapt to new uses. Otherwise you end up with hundreds of little platforms each designed for a small target group, expensive to maintain and barely manageable.
If putting out a 64bit platform will cost you only a little more than designing the next 32bit platform, why maintain both a 32bit and a 64bit product line? You can use the 64bit technology for both, thus making the 32bit obsolete. You now cover a large range of uses from servers crunching through Terabytes of data down to cash registers summing up $7.99, $0.50 and $3.99 in a small gift shop with only a single technology. Every improvement at one end is available through your whole product line without additional cost. Even though the cash register at a little store will never encounter numbers outside the 0 - 1mio range, why make the additional effort to design a custom 20bit processor for cash registers, if a stock 32bit processor will do too? Why artificially limit your computer to 32bit registers, if 64bit registers are available at reasonable prices?
Second, as the article said, it's a lot of work on the part of the spammer. They'd have to send out thousands of messages to each target to "sniff them out" and most of those wouldn't even be effective since most of them would be caught by filters and those few that got through very few would load the HTML bugs to identify themselves.
This is exactly the point. Most of the spam examples will die out because they have an ineffective collection of non spam words. But a few will survive and you now can train an own Bayesian filter which collects the versions of spam that generated webbug hits. After a while some words will shine prominently in your Bayesian filter database for being very effective at slipping through Bayesian spam filters.
Basicly you a fighting the dote with itself. And yes. You can automate the process. Just take your everyday spam (penis enlargement, unsecured credit, Nigerian business opportunities...), take a dictionary and then randomly mix dictionary words into your spam messages and send them out to your email database. Create a website to get the webbug hits and associate every spam message with a hash of the random dictionary words to identify successful sets of anti spam words.
I've never been blinded by the sun glinting off a pile of sugar, but I sure have when it glinted off the bumper of my '84 Buick tank.
;)
Go to White Sands, NM
It's a gypsum desert, purely white (ok, ok. It's calcium sulfate, so it's not as bright as titanium dioxide, but there are no titanium dioxide deserts I am aware of).
When I was there in summer (115 F/46C in the non existant shadows!) I had to actually hold my hand below my eyes to see anything, and usual sunglasses wouldn't have helped because they don't shadow the eyes from light coming in from below.
The main difference between white and mirror is that the mirror reflects the sunlight beam in a single direction, and if the mirror has an optical albedo of 0,9 (90% of the visual light gets reflected), you look at 90% of the full sunlight if the reflection of the sunlight hits your eye (which is quite bright), but you get barely anything at other angles (just the reflection of the general brightness of the surroundings).
A white surface doesn't necessarily keep the light beam parallel, so you see a bright surface from a very large angle. A white surface with an optical albedo of 0,99 (only 1% of the visual light gets sucked in and turned into infrared) can be calculated as a new light source, which emits nearly all of the incoming light according to its own characteristics. That means that the light you receive from it depends on the angle you look at it and the distance you have from it. But because the white surface emits the light in different directions, you will never get the full intensity of 99% at a single point, and the intensity decreases further with the square of the distance (if you double your distance to the surface you get a quarter of the intensity).
So even if a white surface may be 10 times more effective as a mirror (with 1% light loss in reflection vs. 10% light loss in reflection), from a certain point the mirror will look brighter: If you stand directly in the reflected light beam.
(Those different properties of reemitting received light are wellknown to the computer graphic specialists, because both effects they get handled differently: For mostly reflecting surfaces like mirrors and polished things ray tracing is a quite good model to calculate the light impression, for matte surfaces like stones, wood and walls radiosity yields better results.)
(PS: Those albedo numbers are made up, but they shouldn't be far away from reality).
At least, wear a shirt and tie.
I don't wear ties. And yes, I am employed.
Imagine you are standing in your favourite supermarket, and you wonder if you should buy eggs, because you want to bake a cake for the weekend. With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home. With a 10.* IP address you can't.
;)
Think about what an address is good for: to address something. Giving it an unique identifier, so your request goes to the right place. There are definitely more than 2^32 objects in the world to be addressed. Think about embedding phone numbers in IP, as necessary with all the gimmicky mobile phones.
I guess the phone numbers alone exhaust the IPv4 space.
Think about people on aircrafts, if you could reach them because every flight seat has its own address (no need to go to the tower, speak to the pilot, sending the stewardess...) Think about utilities remotely querying the counters for electricity, water, gas and heating in each home. Of course a single utility could use 10.* addresses, but what if there is a merger? Or the billing gets outsourced to another company?
Think about computer management, where every device (processor, harddrive, usb port, monitor...) has its own address, no need to fiddle around with nonstandard SNMP extensions, just query the device directly.
Think about giving every postal address an IPv6 address, thus improving the automatical sorting at the postal services. People don't need to know the actual IPv6 address themselves, let the postal guys do the "DNS"
NAT is fine for a network with a few hosts and hundreds of clients, because the clients initiate the request. NAT is unusable in any environment, where you have lots of little servers and services, which are just listening for requests.
Because the previous poster talked about using brute force. Brute force to me means: Don't use any structural information you have, just try every possibility.
And if you don't know anything about the key beside the fact that it has 1024 bits, you end up with 2^1024 keys to evaluate.
Of course a more sophisticated way would have been to use only the prime numbers between 1 and 2^1024 (If the algorithm were RSA). But a) that's not completely brute force and b) to get all prime numbers you could use brute force again (to evaluate Prim(x) divide x by all y x, for which Prim(y) = TRUE.)
On the other hand the previous poster claimed ALL encryption could be broken by using brute force and given enough time. And all I wanted to show is that this claim, while it holds true in a mathematical sense is quite theoretical.
In theory and given enough time, yes.
:) Our current universe is about 15 billion years old, so if you had 10^197 parallel universes, and you started at the Big Bang, you may be ready with brute force by now.
0 00 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 universes!
But if you can chuck all electrons of the world on it (about 10^91) and every electron is swinging with 10^15Hz, and every swing allows you to do a Yes-No-decision, you have a number cruncher that can check about 10^106 bits a second. If your key is 1024 bits long, you can check about 10^103 keys every second. There are 2^1024 different 1024 bit keys out there (about 10^320), so you need about 10^217 seconds to exhaust the key space with brute force, if you have the whole universe working as a big computer for you. A year has a little more than 30 Mio seconds, so your world computer needs 10^209 years for the task, give or take about a factor of 100 maybe. 10^211 years, 10^207 years, what's the difference anyway?
Imagine that:
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Second: In my post I was argueing differently: If you don't have a working net of high speed transport in place, consisting of autobahns and roads for individual traffic, a rail network for short and mid distances, and several airports for the long ones, and you have to build the whole infrastructure anyway, then the initial building cost for Maglev trains look quite different. In this case you can't leverage the existing infrastructure for the other traffic systems, because it is virtually nonexistant.
So EVERY new traffic system comes with the same high obstacles you have with Maglevs, with the possible exception for roads, autobahns and busses, because they also operate in the existing environment of ways and narrow paths, even though quite badly. That's why most developping countries have a vast system of bus networks, taxis and the strange interbreed of both, the community taxis. That are 7 to 15 seated vans travelling fixed ways, but without a general schedule and dedicated stops. They often have a sign telling which direction they travel, and you just wave to them to have them stopping so you can board them. The driver will also agree to use a side road if everyone on board agrees and if it fits better to your needs. Prices are higher than regular busses, but lower than the individual taxis. (I've seen and used those community taxis in several countries, and the principle is the same everywhere.)
Third: The fact that the first commercial high speed Maglev was build in China, proves my point. China's economy is strong enough to yield the capital needed for a Maglev implementation, but the current traffic system needs a vast expansion to adapt to the development.
- There are many advantages for Transrapid tracks:
- Steep slopes: Transrapid trains can easily climb 6 to 10 percent slopes (6-10ft height difference on 100ft), because the magnets are strong enough to pull the train up and there is no limit posed by the rail-wheel contact.
- Small curves: The Transrapid train can travel in curves with 2km (1,3mls) radius at 200 kph (130mph), in curves with 2,5km (1,6mls) with 250 kph (160mph), because the track can be slanted up to 12 degrees. Normal rail tracks can't use those slants, because you have always to consider the possibility, that a train may have to stop there.
- The track doesn't need much space of the landscape, because it runs mostly on pylons. You have to found those pylons every 100-200m (300-600ft), but you don't cut the landscape in half as with traditional tracks. People and animals can roam freely around the track.
- With the above cited properties you can build Transrapid tracks in densely settled environments like cities and thus build the train stations in the town centers. So you don't need to provide extra means to get to the stations, quite different than with airports, which consume much space and thus need to be built outside the towns.
With all those advantages: Why don't we have plenty of Transrapid tracks? There are two principal answers:- Maglev trains like the Transrapid are VERY expensive to build. Basicly the whole track is a continious bridge, this makes the construction not even cheap. Switches between tracks are even more complicated, Transrapid for instance uses a 250m long steel frame which can be bended over the full length to provide smooth connections from one track to the next.
- Maglev trains are yet another infrastructure completely independend from the existing infrastructures for roads, tracks, rivers, channels and airports. You can't use anything already existing, you have to start completely anew. That means even for a single relation you have to put a complete chain of constructions in place, starting from power substations and tracks to maintenance buildings and passenger access. This makes the initial investions high without guaranteering an early return on investment. It also means that in the beginning without a complete net of relations the passengers have to use at least one other transport system for their travel, thus making it necessary to connect to the existing transportation infrastructure.
Maglev trains fill a very small ecological niche fitting inbetween conventional trains and airplanes. To get a sufficient amount of revenue you have to look at potential relations that are insufficiently served by current systems, where the conventional systems can't simply be expanded. The Pudong-Shanghai relation was such an example: The busses and cabs are at their capacity limit due to traffic jams, a conventional train was not available for the whole distance, and it was not easy to connect the old train tracks to the town center.Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place, especially if airports and rail tracks are missing. Here you could put a system in place that serves both: commuter traffic and long distance travel. It would be more expensive than conventional trains. But it will be much cheaper than trains+airports, and sooner or later you will need both of them.
Then you have the next issue: In Germany we have two big providers which host virtually the majority of all german sites (*.de) and a lot of *.com and *.org too.
(Yes, *.de is the third largest toplevel domain, larger than *.org...)
Most of those domains are hosted via a large cluster of linux machines at the one provider, or via a SUN cluster at the other. We are not talking about a few hundred of domains, we are talking about more than a million each (and another million on "dedicated servers", "virtual servers" and what more products they have...)
So how do you count those big clusters fairly and unbiased?
One each, because they are basicly one system each? Number of IPs? This can change every day, when they add new machines or remove old ones. DNS is doing round-robin to loadbalance the domains onto the IPs, so there is no 1:n mapping of IPs and domainnames, more an m:n. Importance and traffic to those sites? They have everything from vanity sites and "Here's my CV" up to online shops, and even some towns and villages have their sites hosted at those clusters, so where is the limit?
There is just no easy answer how to calculate a market share of servers. Because what the servers are serving is too different.
Wafers are produced as slices from long, round silicium blocks. They have this form because that's the way they come out of the zone heating ovens used to purify the silicium and melt out all the atoms you don't want on the chip. Non silicium atoms cause defects in the crystalline structure because of different size and number of electrons in the shell.
;)
That's one of the issues with 300mm wafers (where 300mm refers to about one foot in diameter): The silicium blocks are wider in diameter, thus needing larger zone heating ovens, thus more energy evenly distributed over the whole zone. If the energy isn't exact the right one in the melting zone, the wrong atoms get out.
The purified silicium blocks then get sawed into thin slices. Larger slices are more prone to breaking during the handling, another issue to overcome while going to larger wafer sizes. They have larger surfaces which could be scratched or damaged.
On the other hand: Once you have the whole process running, you get more chips from the same area
Ieh -Mull!
No. Mull is the white stuff you have in your first aid package to cover wounds sterilly. The actual word is Muell.