Another area that has been elusive to computers is automated proofs of theorems
in mathematics.
Automated theorem provers such as
Otter and Isabelle typically cannot prove "deep" theorems that
human mathematicians prove on a routine basis.
Only occasionally does a computer prove a theorem previously unsolved by humans,
such as
Robbins algebras are
Boolean, but these tend to be problems (like this one) involving simple algebraic
manipulations. Something like Fermat's Last Theorem, forget it; Wiles' proof has not even been
verified by computer, much less automatically proved. The correctness of
Wiles proof is at this point based on a consensus of human mathematicians, who may
or may not (hopefully not) have overlooked some subtle flaw in its incredibly
deep proof.
BTW don't confuse theorem provers with
symbolic algebra systems such as Mathematica, Maple, or the GPL'ed
Maxima. While
indispensable for complicated calculus problems etc. beyond
what a human can practically do, AFAIK they cannot prove even a
simple abstract result such as the
irrationality of the square root of 2.
Except that mom & pop will forget the "." in "rename.htm.html $i" just
as you did, creating a nightmare when their web visitors try to find
nightmare.html. (Not to mention they'll also not understand why their
hyperlinks will not magically get updated too..)
I would not trust the downloads from this site. I can't believe this is
run by security professionals who if anyone should be promoting public
inspection of their programs' source code for security bugs. I could
find no mention of source code (except for a handful of standard GPL'ed
things like ncat), so you're blindly running a mysterious binary that
who knows what it might do to your system, intentional or not. And look
at their draconian terms; apparently you're not allowed to publish the results of
any benchmark. This is supposed to be a non-profit outfit to benefit
the public, that the government endorses?
Limitations on Use
Receipt of the CIS download package components does not permit you to:
a. Sell the CIS download package components;
b. Lease or lend the CIS download package components;
c. Distribute the CIS download package components by any means,
including, but not limited to, through the Internet or other electronic
distribution, direct mail, retail, or mail order (Certain internal
distribution rights are specifically granted to CIS Consulting and User
Members as noted in (2.e.) below);
d. In any other manner and through any medium commercially exploit or
use the CIS download package components for any commercial purpose;
e. Post the Benchmarks, software tools, or associated documentation on
any internal or external web site. (Consulting and User Members of CIS
may distribute the CIS download package components within their own
organization);
f. Represent or claim a particular level of compliance with the CIS
Benchmarks unless the system is operated by a Consulting or User Member
of CIS and has been scored against the Benchmark criteria by a
monitoring tool obtained directly from CIS or a commercial monitoring
tool certified by CIS.
Look at the zillion unpatched windows boxes out there and think what
would happen if they all had a [Apache|OpenSSH|ftp] vulnerability? What
if the vulnerability was in something more obscure, like snmp? RedHat
and Ximian (and others) have made great strides in getting there, but
there's a lot of work remaining to be done.
I think the default install of major distrs need a limited,
free up2date type feature that runs nightly, or at least weekly, in a
cron job to check for and automatically install the major security
patches. Or maybe at least tell the user there is a security update,
and click OK to install. The power users can turn this off and do their
own manual stuff, but Joe Average isn't going to care and rarely will
patch the system manually. MS already does this by default on XP and
for better or worse it's probably a good thing for the average user,
security-wise. And it should happen whether or not the Linux distro is
officially "registered" or just an ISO copy from a friend.
So who will pay for it? I'm not sure, perhaps some.org thing with
people around the world volunteering mirrors. I'd volunteer mine. I
don't think the bandwidth requirements would be extreme - major holes
aren't found that often - but if Linux ever takes off with the general
public, and a major hole is found and left unpatched on millions of home
systems, hacked boxes and Ramen-type worms are going to be a big
problem.
So now we have another RIAA/MPAA-like cartel. The dealers are the ones
who want the codes kept secret (from everyone else but them). So the
next time you buy a car, ask for the codes as part of the deal. If the
dealer refuses, let him/her know that they lost a sale - there are
plenty of brands to pick from. If possible wait until all the paperwork
is prepared, then just before signing on the
dotted line, act shocked to discover that essential repair
information is being withheld from you (which means you will not really "own" the car, so you are
being cheated).
That will help drive home the point. Probably more so than returning a
copy-protected CD. If enough people do this...
If you don't see the problem with secret repair codes,
would you buy a computer with diagnostic
codes that were kept secret in order to force you to
return it to the factory for repair at exorbitant
rates?
From article:...Microsoft's ambitious-and risky-plan to remake the personal computer to
ensure security, privacy and intellectual property rights.
So the goal is "ensure... privacy and intellectual property rights" - isn't that an oxymoron?
If you can hear/see it, you can copy it. But on one can know you're copying
it unless they invade your privacy. You cannot have it both ways.
A number of years back I wrote test programs for printed circuit boards. First
you created a model for the board that simulated the logic circuits. You then
wrote test patterns that were applied to the board's inputs, and the simulator model
predicted the board's outputs. The inputs together with the predicted outputs
were applied to a real board that you wanted to test, and if this test program
passed you assumed that the PC board was good with a high degree of probability.
One mode of the simulator allowed you to simulate faults that might occur on the
board. The simplest kinds of faults were physical IC pins "stuck-at-zero" and "stuck-at-one"
(these were the most common faults in real life),
and if you wanted to be thorough you could also simulate "internal" faults down to the
gate level.
I worked in a contract test programming house, where the contract with the customer required
us to produce a test program with a specified minimum level of fault coverage, usually
just at the physical IC pin level to minimize cost of developing the program.
This ranged from say 90% for cheaper commercial work to 99%+ for certain government
contracts. With >95% coverage, the "real life" fault coverage was maybe one or two
"dog pile" boards out of 1000 would pass the test program but fail a system test.
The point of this is in that business, there was a clear objective measure of a
test programs "quality". The measure wasn't perfect, but it was far better than just
blindly writing a test program based on a "gut feel" for how the board should work.
In addition, the test programmer had a clear, objective goal.
I think a useful tool in the software business would be a measurement of the
percent of lines of code that were actually run during the QA process, along with
a log of those lines that were not run and not run. Often there are big chunks of code that only
get triggered by very special conditions, and there is no way QA can guess those
strange conditions. The standard QA process is very subjective; there is no objective
measure of any kind as to how thorough the testing was, other than just documenting
a list of features that were (often superficially) exercised.
A more sophisticated tool could go beyond lines of code and into log the
various logic combinations exercised in "if" statements, etc.
Several years ago I wrote an experimental tool that did this for a
specialized database programming language. Basically it rewrote the
program with a logging call after each statement (and yes, the "QA
version" ran very slowly). The results were quite eye-opening,
revealing chunks of "dead code" and conditions no one ever thought of
testing. Unfortunately the project kind of died.
Many languages have "code profilers" that are mainly intended to analyze
performance, but many of them could be easily adapted to become QA quality
measurement tools.
Do these kinds of tools exist, and if so why aren't they more widely used?
Another Mozilla bug that will bring Windows XP to its knees is the
"snow effect"
bug ( bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64516 ) that hogs nearly 100% of the CPU time. XP's concept of multitasking
is such that while CTRL-ALT-DEL will theoretically respond so you can
kill the process, in practice you might as well hit the reset button
(at least I've never had enough patience to wait).
Please go and vote for this bug.
I release the parable to public domain. Therefore, if you take it
and fix its grammatical mistakes, in particular correcting (as another
poster pointed out) "breath" to "breathe" where appropriate (how
embarrassing...), you will have created an original work and may
copyright it as your own. Just as Corbis now owns the digital rights to
the paintings of the masters. After all, it took a great deal of
effort, skill, and creativity to take snapshots of these paintings and
scan them into a computer.
Of course, the parable, or fable if you prefer, is entirely fictional. But some organizations
with wild imaginations may perceive a coincidental resemblance. To
avoid being inconvenienced by them or their supporters I choose not to reveal
my identity.
Once upon a time, some people lived in a cave, and no one knew that
there was a world outside of the cave. The cave provided everything
they needed, with plenty of fish and water. Luminous mushrooms provided
both food and light. The only thing in short supply was air. All air
came through a small shaft connected to the outside world. The shaft
was controlled by a single company, Microshaft, which carefully rationed
its flow to maximize demand and collected breathing license fees from
everyone who had to breath. To save money the company hired cheap labor
to operate the valves, but these laborers were often barely competent,
and the air supply was unreliable. The shaft was poorly maintained, the
air was often stale and laden with viruses. By selling a product that
cost them essentially nothing to produce, Microshaft's profits were
enormous and they became rich and powerful.
One day, a group of daring young renegades discovered that there were
other ways to get air, just by moving some rocks that blocked openings
to the outside. And they offered their air free. At first people were
hesitant to use Free Air, thinking something must be wrong with it since
it was free. Initially Microshaft ignored the renegades, dismissing
them as a fringe movement and minor nuisance. But eventually Microshaft
saw them as a threat. They started a major marketing campaign to
convince people that the Free Air was bad for their health. But people
found that they actually felt better and healthier breathing the free,
fresh air. Microshaft added more and more features to their air,
perfuming it and coloring it with smoke to give it "added value". Many
people started to dislike Microshaft's heavy, bloated air that was hard
to breath and began flocking in droves to the sources of Free Air.
About this time, after some years of hard volunteer work, Open Air
developers finally increased the size of a Free Air portal so that a
person could actually squeeze through to the outside. The first brave
individuals who ventured through it discovered that not only was there
an unlimited supply of air in the outside world, there was no way you
could harness and control its supply.
Alarmed, Microshaft sought to have the government declare Free Air
illegal since it threatened their business model, which they had
developed and rightfully earned through many years of hard work. They
called the use of Free Air "theft" and claimed that the "viral" nature
of the Public Breathing License advocated by many Open Air rebels would
threaten the livelihood of Microshaft's suppliers and distributors.
Indeed, the whole economy of the cave would collapse, they said. Laws
were quickly passed and the portals of Free Air were sealed off.
A charitable organization called the Business Air Alliance was formed
to help protect businesses against the threat of Free Air portals. By
proving that it was theoretically possible to fund terrorist
organizations with the money saved by breathing Free Air, the BAA
successfully lobbied to strengthen the laws so that any attempt to make
an opening to the outside became punishable by death. Possession of
shovels and picks became a criminal offense, and the BAA performed
random audits to help citizens comply with the law. For their
protection, everyone was required to wear an Air Rights Management
security device, which would send an alarm to the authorities if it
didn't detect a secret mix of fumes found only in Microshaft air.
As time passed, Microshaft and the government became
indistinguishable. To prevent future uprisings, a new feature was added
to the air to keep the people sedated happily ever after.
All governments purchases are normally supposed to be open for
competitive bidding. The bid will list a set of features required for
an item being purchased, and the low bidder providing a product with
those features wins the bid.
A feature is an objective attribute such as "provides variable-sized
fonts". It is not something like "must be identical to MS Office".
Just as a bid for cars will specify horsepower, gas mileage, etc. and
cannot say "must be identical to a Ford."
Something like StarOffice or even OpenOffice would satisfy the needs 99%
of all government workers. We're talking about basic office documents
and memos, nothing exotic.
Surely there must be actual RFPs somewhere, if only as a formality to
satisfy the law, that end up being won by MS. Who bids on these, and
why does MS always win? Even if you sold them OpenOffice for $1 a copy,
perhaps enhancing it (under GPL) to add some arcane feature or two that currently
only MS has in order to satisfy the RFP, you could become quite wealthy. If it meets the requirements of the RFP and has a lower price, the government must accept the bid, in order to minimize the cost
to the taxpayers.
Most tubes are going to require abot 16,000 volts to the grid. You'll need a nice-sized transformer to step up normal line current to that.
I think others have already mentioned that most tubes
require 100-300 volts on B+ for the plate. And -3v or so is typical
for a control grid (although B+ is usually applied to the screen grid, which does not control the signal but has a different purpose). In the 1950's car
radios had tubes that used 12 volts for B+.
BTW the only power source mentioned on the data sheet
is a 3v lithium battery. (I am tempted to joke that
they neglected to mention that it was the size of a refrigerator and required 2-inch copper bus bars.
Oops, I just did. Yeah, I know it's for the CMOS clock chip.)
Mod parent up. More people need to know about this blatant RFC 2046 violation
that corrupts carefully composed multipart/alternative emails. Sometimes it
makes me want to scream that Microsoft gets away with this stuff and
no one seems to care. Or maybe they don't realize their correspondents are
receiving a corrupted version on the other side, and the correspondents just
assume the sender is sloppy and lazy.
BTW a good way to get nicely formatted text/plain content is:
links -dump abc.html > abc.txt
with neatly formatted tables and everything. Unfortunately only
your non-Exchange recipients will see it.
Now if Exchange automatically put in a text/plain for attached Word
documents, I might buy that...:)
People were happy to buy an inferior (M$ Encarta - not that it was bad,
just less information) product because it was so much cheaper, and
almost as good. (emphasis mine)
And also, perhaps, misinformation, with history being colored to
suit MS's corporate image. For example, there's this
from the March
1998 Dr. Dobb's
Journal:
"According to The New Yorker, 'after Microsoft bought the Funk &
Wagnalls encyclopedia and turned it into...Encarta...the entry on Bill
Gates changed.' The clause 'known as a tough competitor who seems to
value winning in a competitive environment over money' was changed to
read, 'known for his personal and corporate contributions to charity and
educational organizations.'"
Re:Heres the post everyone should read first
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 2
"Mozilla/Netscape cant render page X"
Maybe it WOULD render page X if you stopped using IE and wrote that same msg to the site owner
I have done this a number of times, and the webmaster usually responds (if he/she responds
at all) that the percent of
non-IE users doesn't make it worth it. However in maybe 25% of the cases they do fix the
problem, especially if it's minor and especially if you show them the exact correction
needed to their HTML code.
I suspect their tune may change if and when 30 million AOL users start using Netscape...
This would be the best thing to happen to Mozilla, whether you love or hate AOL.
And bucking the trend, slashdot today announced it would begin to
publish a newstand edition of its "News for Gnurds,
Stuff that Matters" site. For a premium, a phone-book-sized "full" edition is also available that includes comments rated at
-1, exposing the real dirt in the computer community.
That thing no longer works because the ratio hc/e has been refined and found to be not quite 1/137
The number 3+7+127=137 is just a rough qualitative first cut. When
properly refined, the bit-string physics model predicts
137.0359 674 vs. the experimental
137.0359 895(61). See this
paper for more details.
TV ads are a terrible bargain for the user, paying us about $1.20 per
hour of our attention.
The ads don't pay us anything. The
advertisers pay the TV network.
Assuming about 10 minutes of ads per hour, and a penny per 30
seconds, the advertisers pay the TV network 20 cents/hr/viewer to
deliver content "free". So, assuming the content is worth that much,
the alternative is to have each viewer pay 20 cents/hr to view a show
with no advertisements. Would the majority of viewers pay that? I
don't know. Perhaps I would. But then I rarely watch TV anyway, except
cartoons with my son while reading/. in the background, so I don't
think I'm a good example.
Software should never crash, no matter what input you put into
it. That's taught in every first year programming class I've ever seen,
and it goes double for software that controls peripherals.
Yes, but *where* is the software? Part of the software is the bits stored
in the firmware. Another part of the software is the (corrupted) bits stored
on the copy-protected CD. After all, CDs hold programs, too - and the
Mac seems to get confused about "what" is on the CD since it is corrupted.
It responds to this confusion in an unfortunate way, and I agree of course
that it shouldn't have been designed to respond that way, but nonetheless it is
still responding to a "program" of corrupted bits on the CD.
If I gave you a bootable CD-ROM with an.exe that instructed the CPU to
erase your disk drive if certain "copy protection" features weren't
present on your machine, would this be the CPU's fault?
When you aquire a Microsoft product, install it freely on a wide number
of machines. When Microsoft demands an audit, then you comply with a
head count (which is all they really want anyway), and pay the ransom
for the licences that you have had all along. Since you didn't pay for
them the first time, you're even, and will have little to complain
about.
Except that the "ransom" will be $100,000 per illegal copy, which is the
penalty for piracy according to the US law, and is enforced by the BSA --
unless you strike some amicable "agreement" with MS to settle for, say, 51% of
your company's stock plus 100% commitment to MS for essentially
eternity.
From the article: As of February 26, 2002 IBM said: [...] The Linux
code to exploit the 64-bit architecture will be available from the IBM
developerWorks Web site later. Linux for S/390, currently available on
G5, G6, and Multiprise 3000 processors, will be able to execute on
zSeries servers in 31-bit mode.
I checked, and yes, the IBM site did
say "31-bit" mode. Won't this break a lot of Linux apps?
Slashdot Mirror
And people used their REAL NAMES! (In the good old days I did that too.)
Only occasionally does a computer prove a theorem previously unsolved by humans, such as Robbins algebras are Boolean, but these tend to be problems (like this one) involving simple algebraic manipulations. Something like Fermat's Last Theorem, forget it; Wiles' proof has not even been verified by computer, much less automatically proved. The correctness of Wiles proof is at this point based on a consensus of human mathematicians, who may or may not (hopefully not) have overlooked some subtle flaw in its incredibly deep proof.
BTW don't confuse theorem provers with symbolic algebra systems such as Mathematica, Maple, or the GPL'ed Maxima. While indispensable for complicated calculus problems etc. beyond what a human can practically do, AFAIK they cannot prove even a simple abstract result such as the irrationality of the square root of 2.
Except that mom & pop will forget the "." in "rename .htm .html $i" just
as you did, creating a nightmare when their web visitors try to find
nightmare.html. (Not to mention they'll also not understand why their
hyperlinks will not magically get updated too..)
Just add a roll-up keyboard and you almost have one. Not sure about the mouse or CPU...
Of course, the CPU would be IBM's Linux wristwatch.
Just add a roll-up keyboard and you almost have one. Not sure about the mouse or CPU...
Limitations on Use
Receipt of the CIS download package components does not permit you to:
a. Sell the CIS download package components;
b. Lease or lend the CIS download package components;
c. Distribute the CIS download package components by any means, including, but not limited to, through the Internet or other electronic distribution, direct mail, retail, or mail order (Certain internal distribution rights are specifically granted to CIS Consulting and User Members as noted in (2.e.) below);
d. In any other manner and through any medium commercially exploit or use the CIS download package components for any commercial purpose;
e. Post the Benchmarks, software tools, or associated documentation on any internal or external web site. (Consulting and User Members of CIS may distribute the CIS download package components within their own organization);
f. Represent or claim a particular level of compliance with the CIS Benchmarks unless the system is operated by a Consulting or User Member of CIS and has been scored against the Benchmark criteria by a monitoring tool obtained directly from CIS or a commercial monitoring tool certified by CIS.
I think the default install of major distrs need a limited, free up2date type feature that runs nightly, or at least weekly, in a cron job to check for and automatically install the major security patches. Or maybe at least tell the user there is a security update, and click OK to install. The power users can turn this off and do their own manual stuff, but Joe Average isn't going to care and rarely will patch the system manually. MS already does this by default on XP and for better or worse it's probably a good thing for the average user, security-wise. And it should happen whether or not the Linux distro is officially "registered" or just an ISO copy from a friend.
So who will pay for it? I'm not sure, perhaps some .org thing with
people around the world volunteering mirrors. I'd volunteer mine. I
don't think the bandwidth requirements would be extreme - major holes
aren't found that often - but if Linux ever takes off with the general
public, and a major hole is found and left unpatched on millions of home
systems, hacked boxes and Ramen-type worms are going to be a big
problem.
An omission from their approved license list is the most liberal "license" of all, which is "released unconditionally to public domain".
If you don't see the problem with secret repair codes, would you buy a computer with diagnostic codes that were kept secret in order to force you to return it to the factory for repair at exorbitant rates?
So the goal is "ensure ... privacy and intellectual property rights" - isn't that an oxymoron?
If you can hear/see it, you can copy it. But on one can know you're copying
it unless they invade your privacy. You cannot have it both ways.
A number of years back I wrote test programs for printed circuit boards. First you created a model for the board that simulated the logic circuits. You then wrote test patterns that were applied to the board's inputs, and the simulator model predicted the board's outputs. The inputs together with the predicted outputs were applied to a real board that you wanted to test, and if this test program passed you assumed that the PC board was good with a high degree of probability.
One mode of the simulator allowed you to simulate faults that might occur on the board. The simplest kinds of faults were physical IC pins "stuck-at-zero" and "stuck-at-one" (these were the most common faults in real life), and if you wanted to be thorough you could also simulate "internal" faults down to the gate level.
I worked in a contract test programming house, where the contract with the customer required us to produce a test program with a specified minimum level of fault coverage, usually just at the physical IC pin level to minimize cost of developing the program. This ranged from say 90% for cheaper commercial work to 99%+ for certain government contracts. With >95% coverage, the "real life" fault coverage was maybe one or two "dog pile" boards out of 1000 would pass the test program but fail a system test.
The point of this is in that business, there was a clear objective measure of a test programs "quality". The measure wasn't perfect, but it was far better than just blindly writing a test program based on a "gut feel" for how the board should work. In addition, the test programmer had a clear, objective goal.
I think a useful tool in the software business would be a measurement of the percent of lines of code that were actually run during the QA process, along with a log of those lines that were not run and not run. Often there are big chunks of code that only get triggered by very special conditions, and there is no way QA can guess those strange conditions. The standard QA process is very subjective; there is no objective measure of any kind as to how thorough the testing was, other than just documenting a list of features that were (often superficially) exercised.
A more sophisticated tool could go beyond lines of code and into log the various logic combinations exercised in "if" statements, etc.
Several years ago I wrote an experimental tool that did this for a specialized database programming language. Basically it rewrote the program with a logging call after each statement (and yes, the "QA version" ran very slowly). The results were quite eye-opening, revealing chunks of "dead code" and conditions no one ever thought of testing. Unfortunately the project kind of died.
Many languages have "code profilers" that are mainly intended to analyze performance, but many of them could be easily adapted to become QA quality measurement tools.
Do these kinds of tools exist, and if so why aren't they more widely used?
Another Mozilla bug that will bring Windows XP to its knees is the "snow effect" bug ( bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64516 ) that hogs nearly 100% of the CPU time. XP's concept of multitasking is such that while CTRL-ALT-DEL will theoretically respond so you can kill the process, in practice you might as well hit the reset button (at least I've never had enough patience to wait). Please go and vote for this bug.
I release the parable to public domain. Therefore, if you take it and fix its grammatical mistakes, in particular correcting (as another poster pointed out) "breath" to "breathe" where appropriate (how embarrassing...), you will have created an original work and may copyright it as your own. Just as Corbis now owns the digital rights to the paintings of the masters. After all, it took a great deal of effort, skill, and creativity to take snapshots of these paintings and scan them into a computer.
Of course, the parable, or fable if you prefer, is entirely fictional. But some organizations with wild imaginations may perceive a coincidental resemblance. To avoid being inconvenienced by them or their supporters I choose not to reveal my identity.
Thank you.
One day, a group of daring young renegades discovered that there were other ways to get air, just by moving some rocks that blocked openings to the outside. And they offered their air free. At first people were hesitant to use Free Air, thinking something must be wrong with it since it was free. Initially Microshaft ignored the renegades, dismissing them as a fringe movement and minor nuisance. But eventually Microshaft saw them as a threat. They started a major marketing campaign to convince people that the Free Air was bad for their health. But people found that they actually felt better and healthier breathing the free, fresh air. Microshaft added more and more features to their air, perfuming it and coloring it with smoke to give it "added value". Many people started to dislike Microshaft's heavy, bloated air that was hard to breath and began flocking in droves to the sources of Free Air.
About this time, after some years of hard volunteer work, Open Air developers finally increased the size of a Free Air portal so that a person could actually squeeze through to the outside. The first brave individuals who ventured through it discovered that not only was there an unlimited supply of air in the outside world, there was no way you could harness and control its supply.
Alarmed, Microshaft sought to have the government declare Free Air illegal since it threatened their business model, which they had developed and rightfully earned through many years of hard work. They called the use of Free Air "theft" and claimed that the "viral" nature of the Public Breathing License advocated by many Open Air rebels would threaten the livelihood of Microshaft's suppliers and distributors. Indeed, the whole economy of the cave would collapse, they said. Laws were quickly passed and the portals of Free Air were sealed off.
A charitable organization called the Business Air Alliance was formed to help protect businesses against the threat of Free Air portals. By proving that it was theoretically possible to fund terrorist organizations with the money saved by breathing Free Air, the BAA successfully lobbied to strengthen the laws so that any attempt to make an opening to the outside became punishable by death. Possession of shovels and picks became a criminal offense, and the BAA performed random audits to help citizens comply with the law. For their protection, everyone was required to wear an Air Rights Management security device, which would send an alarm to the authorities if it didn't detect a secret mix of fumes found only in Microshaft air.
As time passed, Microshaft and the government became indistinguishable. To prevent future uprisings, a new feature was added to the air to keep the people sedated happily ever after.
A feature is an objective attribute such as "provides variable-sized fonts". It is not something like "must be identical to MS Office". Just as a bid for cars will specify horsepower, gas mileage, etc. and cannot say "must be identical to a Ford."
Something like StarOffice or even OpenOffice would satisfy the needs 99% of all government workers. We're talking about basic office documents and memos, nothing exotic.
Surely there must be actual RFPs somewhere, if only as a formality to satisfy the law, that end up being won by MS. Who bids on these, and why does MS always win? Even if you sold them OpenOffice for $1 a copy, perhaps enhancing it (under GPL) to add some arcane feature or two that currently only MS has in order to satisfy the RFP, you could become quite wealthy. If it meets the requirements of the RFP and has a lower price, the government must accept the bid, in order to minimize the cost to the taxpayers.
I think others have already mentioned that most tubes require 100-300 volts on B+ for the plate. And -3v or so is typical for a control grid (although B+ is usually applied to the screen grid, which does not control the signal but has a different purpose). In the 1950's car radios had tubes that used 12 volts for B+.
BTW the only power source mentioned on the data sheet is a 3v lithium battery. (I am tempted to joke that they neglected to mention that it was the size of a refrigerator and required 2-inch copper bus bars. Oops, I just did. Yeah, I know it's for the CMOS clock chip.)
BTW a good way to get nicely formatted text/plain content is:
with neatly formatted tables and everything. Unfortunately only your non-Exchange recipients will see it.Now if Exchange automatically put in a text/plain for attached Word documents, I might buy that... :)
And also, perhaps, misinformation, with history being colored to suit MS's corporate image. For example, there's this from the March 1998 Dr. Dobb's Journal: "According to The New Yorker, 'after Microsoft bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia and turned it into...Encarta...the entry on Bill Gates changed.' The clause 'known as a tough competitor who seems to value winning in a competitive environment over money' was changed to read, 'known for his personal and corporate contributions to charity and educational organizations.'"
Maybe it WOULD render page X if you stopped using IE and wrote that same msg to the site owner
I have done this a number of times, and the webmaster usually responds (if he/she responds at all) that the percent of non-IE users doesn't make it worth it. However in maybe 25% of the cases they do fix the problem, especially if it's minor and especially if you show them the exact correction needed to their HTML code.
I suspect their tune may change if and when 30 million AOL users start using Netscape... This would be the best thing to happen to Mozilla, whether you love or hate AOL.
And bucking the trend, slashdot today announced it would begin to publish a newstand edition of its "News for Gnurds, Stuff that Matters" site. For a premium, a phone-book-sized "full" edition is also available that includes comments rated at -1, exposing the real dirt in the computer community.
The number 3+7+127=137 is just a rough qualitative first cut. When properly refined, the bit-string physics model predicts 137.0359 674 vs. the experimental 137.0359 895(61). See this paper for more details.
The ads don't pay us anything. The advertisers pay the TV network.
Assuming about 10 minutes of ads per hour, and a penny per 30 seconds, the advertisers pay the TV network 20 cents/hr/viewer to deliver content "free". So, assuming the content is worth that much, the alternative is to have each viewer pay 20 cents/hr to view a show with no advertisements. Would the majority of viewers pay that? I don't know. Perhaps I would. But then I rarely watch TV anyway, except cartoons with my son while reading /. in the background, so I don't
think I'm a good example.
Yes, but *where* is the software? Part of the software is the bits stored in the firmware. Another part of the software is the (corrupted) bits stored on the copy-protected CD. After all, CDs hold programs, too - and the Mac seems to get confused about "what" is on the CD since it is corrupted. It responds to this confusion in an unfortunate way, and I agree of course that it shouldn't have been designed to respond that way, but nonetheless it is still responding to a "program" of corrupted bits on the CD.
If I gave you a bootable CD-ROM with an .exe that instructed the CPU to
erase your disk drive if certain "copy protection" features weren't
present on your machine, would this be the CPU's fault?
Except that the "ransom" will be $100,000 per illegal copy, which is the penalty for piracy according to the US law, and is enforced by the BSA -- unless you strike some amicable "agreement" with MS to settle for, say, 51% of your company's stock plus 100% commitment to MS for essentially eternity.
I checked, and yes, the IBM site did say "31-bit" mode. Won't this break a lot of Linux apps?