Move around, eat something, grow larger? Kind of based on the classic BSD (I think) and other early computer game, "Snake." (But with fancy graphics, smooth navigation, and Z levels.) Cool, yes. Revolutionary? Ummmm...
Several years ago, I founded a photo sharing site, which grew quite large (tens of millions of photos, millions of users). At one point in our growth, we did an analysis of what percentage was adult content. Much to our surprise, it was only at 10%, we were expecting much higher. I do suspect the 1% number of this study is unrealistically low, though.
John had a very funny bit on the daily show, where he was explaining the internet (after the "series of tubes" event). He started out with envelopes, representing packets, and said "for example, say I'm a computer..." Jon Stewart interrupted him and said "what kind of computer would you be?" After a bunch of evasive answers ("oh some kind of microcomputer"), with Jon unrelenting, he finally dropped his shoulders, sighed, and said "I'm a PC..." Hilarious.
(I was kind of waiting for a reference to the commercials on the Daily Show, and they delivered:)
There are other international organizations I've heard of, such as the Hash House Harriers which are great way to meet folks in other towns. I've talked with one member at length, who very frequently stayed with friends all over the world met through the organization.
I'm sure there are others, such as Freemasonry, that would allow similar ways to meet potential friends abroad (although the Mason's per se, aren't typically a younger, hipper, net-enabled crowd).
Just gave it a try. IE only, active X install (versus AJAX that google uses; wait, didn't MS start all the XMLHTTP stuff themselves?), which were annoying, but in the end, the quality of the satellite views for Nova Scotia (where I live) are an order of magnitude poorer than Google Earth.
So, IE Only, Poor Canada support. I'll pass for now.
"Engineering level accuracy?" What kind of vague marketing speak crap is that? To the millimeter? To the cm? To the meter? (If I hired an engineer to do a building, I'd probably want accuracy to the inch. Does it do that?)
Can someone please put this in terms of "Libraries of Congress" or "Volkswagens" so I have some sense of perspective??? Help!
I always tend to create the technology behind companies I start, from scratch; but using libraries which are very rich, and becoming better all the time. Modularization and improved libraries, tends to blur the lines of what "from scratch" means. Even a raw C program that uses the standard C library, isn't technically "from scratch," since it leverages the work of others in the libs.
This could be a big boon for development of Linux ports to these handheld platforms. The hassles of figuring out how to access certan bits of hardware, could be greatly mitigated through the information in these sources. Of course, great care would have to be taken to avoid contamination and legal issues, but I think it's manageable. I'm a bit concerned that it talks about the kernel and "certain device drivers," though.
I think you need to look more carefully at what's going on here. It's not that MS is offering an AV product (fine), it's that it will use kernel hooks that are simply not available to other competitors. I think Symantec et al are clever enough to rewrite for Vista, assuming they're not literally locked out. That's what MS is apparantly doing, and that's a problem.
I experienced the exact thing firsthand in the NT days. I worked for MKS, who provided a suite of Posix/Unix tools and shell for DOS, and OS/2 (at the time). I was tasked with the port to Win32 for NT. Among several other challenges, one particular one that comes to mind was the implementation of the "ps" command. Obviously the Task Manager, and the command-line "ps.exe" command that came with NT had some way of getting the process list.
However, there is no documented API for getting this information. In order for me to create a third party program that listed the processes, I had to reverse engineer (pre-DCMA days) the SYSTEM32\PS.EXE, to see how it got its information (through some undocumented INT call).
It's this type of behaviour that is inappropriate for a monopolistic operating system provider. While they have gotten their wrists slapped (if that) for this in a couple of very narrow situations, they still continue this behaviour in a rampant fashion in every way they can, with very few repercussions.
I see conflicting reports on 2.0's memory usage. In my own "stress tests", where a number of tabs (20-50) are loaded, each showing 50-100 mid-sized digital photos, the memory usage in Task Manager showed a nice stable 100M, but the pagefile space usage went up to 2G, making the system slow and unusable.
What is up with the difference between reported process memory usage in Task manager (which is reasonable) and real pagefile usage (which is horrendous with lots of images)? I've brought this up twice already, and no one has commented on it.
This is something about XP that really bothers me, and I consider a design flaw. Several services run together under each svchost.exe process. (Tasklist/svc will show them.)
I have something wrong with my system now, where one of those svchost processes (after while) dies with an unhelpful messages, killing a bunch of other services with it (including ICS/Firewall). They won't restart for me, either. I'm still in the process of disabling services and trying to identify the single one that is causing grief, and bringing others down with it.
And now, according the article, this same behaviour is used as a security exploit. I wonder if my services have been dying from this same exploit being attempted from the outside on my machine.
While Firefox 2.0 might have a small memory foot print reported in task manager (100mb for me) when I open many tabs with memoy images, my swap space usage goes up to over 2g suddenly. What is with all this unreported memory being used??? (When I exite firefox, the page file usage goes back to normal.) The system is unusable in this 2g page file state; looks like it's back to Opera for me.
Penn & Teller did a great show covering Feng shui. (It was pretty funny having several experts on the topic independently do their work, and have absoultey zero consistency between them, for a supposed ancience "science.") The name of their series ("BullSh*t"), pretty much sums it up. I expect a lot of the same would apply for this new science of web science beauty...
It's obvious to them, and anyone, that it's targeted to them, so the fact it's on a magazine, should carry no more weight than a simple office memo, but far more expensive and time consuming to produce. Are their executives really that stupid and impressionable from a print ad??
Stupidist idea I've seen in awhile. Hard to believe Unisys is still dominating the computing industry, despite these brilliant ideas. Oh, wait...
I see a number of people raving about the lower memory footprint on FireFox.
However, I have an application where I have a number of tabs (a couple of dozen), open to pages with many JPG images in them. Suprisingly, most browsers choke on this. The best so far is Opera, but even it starts to choke when many JPG's are on the tabs at once. So I was excited to try the new Firefox.
Well, with a couple of dozen tabs open, the memory footprint of Firefox.exe was nice and low, under a meg. However, system performance was *terrible*. Looking at the Task Manager, over 2G of swap space was in use (hence the choking of the system). As I closed the tabs with the images on them, the swap space usage went down.
Does anyone know what's going on here??? Images on web pages surely can be cached on disk, and displayed as needed, rather than choking up swap space. And if it is Firefox using (virtual) memory to hold those images, why isn't that showing up in the task manager memory usage entry for the process? (Does TM show more of a "RMEM" statistic versus "VMEM"?) It's very frustrating.
The best browser by far for this scenario, is still Opera. It handles many large JPG's very well. At a certain point, it starts failing to render them in some circumstances (paging around won't render them, but if you slowly scroll, they will display). I wonder if there might be some GDI resource allocation limitation going on? Might it be a limit that could be upped?
It seems like such a basic test, but so many browsers fall down on it.
Never really follows this, but after the/. article, I read the wiki entry on Thompson.
Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, Im only interested in virile men. Thats why Im not attracted to you.[8] He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.[9] The special prosecutor rejected the charge and concluded that Thompson did it as a political ploy. Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a kook.
I interviewed for a fairly senior management/tech job. Passed the first three technical interviews with flying colours, but after the fourth, got a f-you-very-much letter. The last one was on management practices, and I was much up front about realizing when to cut losses on someone who's not working out, and let them go (I've been responsible for 75 employees, at my last company's peak). Although I still think that's the right approach, I think that may have been a blunder, since they tend to use peer-reviews. ("D'oh, if this guy becomes my boss, he wouldn't think twice about firing me if I don't perform.":) Also, he asked questions about my past practices, which I should have clarified were ones I appropiately used in a fairly small population area (lots of word of mouth referrals); obviously, for a monster like google, recruiting and hiring practices are different from smaller centers. So I think I should have clarified the differences in approach for each circumstance, despite being asked specifically about my past.
I was pretty surprised at the abruptness of the dismissal, but if there would have been another 10 interviews before reaching "2nd round," as some say, then I'm glad I dropped out at the fourth interview. It's a bit of a shame, I think my skill set, background, and technical approach would have been very well suited to google, and helped them.
But the opportunities in this industry are endless, so life goes on:)
I concur. However, I find Wiki's searching to be a little lame as compared to google, so I end up just doing a google search for what I want, and also stick "wiki" or "wikipedia" as a search term, too, and usually the first result is the wikipedia article. Works like a charm almost all of the time. (And sometimes, you end up stumbling across non-wikipedia but specialized wikis for the topic at hand, which isn't a bad thing:)
I would say it's because it's preying on the ultimately innocent. Just as stomping on innocent and cute newborn puppies or kitties would be seen as far more evil than shooting a dangerous (and therefore, in our eyes, culpable) predatory animal such as a coyote, hurting the most innocent portion of our society, who are growing and learning with enthusiasm, understandably makes us see red.
While some sex offenders are undoubtedly very crafty, misguided desire can seriously cloud their judgement, thankfully, and they end up making really stupid mistakes. I created and hosted a large photo sharing site years ago, and some sicko put a bunch of home-made child porn on it. When it was brought to my attention, I immediately reported it to the FBI, Center for Missing Exploited Children, RCMP, etc.. It took a couple of years, but eventually this creep was brought to trial, and they brought me down to testify.
(Ironically, as a "common carrier", if we were to actively scan for illegal content, we could be held responsible for ensuring *all* the content was proper, and unbearable risk for an online business of any size. So instead, we simply responded to complains, which thankfully were pretty thorough and efficient.)
He only got a few years state time for abusing these poor kids. (It was heartbreaking seeing these poor kids in the witness "green room", and the effect he had on their lives.) The ironic-yet-ultimately-rewarding part, was that for using the Internet for distribution of child porn on our site (a federal offence, since it crossed state lines), he got *life* in prison, with no chance of parole. I was very proud to be part of that process, and helping get this creep off the street is really the most meaningful, and main lasting accomplishment of my Bubble 1.0 experience.
(It was a bit chilling hearing the state trooper with his southern drawl saying "if I had known what this feller had done when I arrested him, I could have saved us all a lot of trouble." I also was told that this creep probably wouldn't last terribly long in prison, once the other inmates found out what he did. Normally, I'm not up for vigilante justice, but when it comes to hurting innocent children, I gotta say the lines sure do blur.)
Slashdot Mirror
Move around, eat something, grow larger? Kind of based on the classic BSD (I think) and other early computer game, "Snake." (But with fancy graphics, smooth navigation, and Z levels.) Cool, yes. Revolutionary? Ummmm...
Wow, reading all of these comments makes me realize how little I know about Quantum Physics. I wish I read that book by that wheelchair guy.
Several years ago, I founded a photo sharing site, which grew quite large (tens of millions of photos, millions of users). At one point in our growth, we did an analysis of what percentage was adult content. Much to our surprise, it was only at 10%, we were expecting much higher. I do suspect the 1% number of this study is unrealistically low, though.
John had a very funny bit on the daily show, where he was explaining the internet (after the "series of tubes" event). He started out with envelopes, representing packets, and said "for example, say I'm a computer..." Jon Stewart interrupted him and said "what kind of computer would you be?" After a bunch of evasive answers ("oh some kind of microcomputer"), with Jon unrelenting, he finally dropped his shoulders, sighed, and said "I'm a PC..." Hilarious.
:)
(I was kind of waiting for a reference to the commercials on the Daily Show, and they delivered
There are other international organizations I've heard of, such as the Hash House Harriers which are great way to meet folks in other towns. I've talked with one member at length, who very frequently stayed with friends all over the world met through the organization.
I'm sure there are others, such as Freemasonry, that would allow similar ways to meet potential friends abroad (although the Mason's per se, aren't typically a younger, hipper, net-enabled crowd).
Just gave it a try. IE only, active X install (versus AJAX that google uses; wait, didn't MS start all the XMLHTTP stuff themselves?), which were annoying, but in the end, the quality of the satellite views for Nova Scotia (where I live) are an order of magnitude poorer than Google Earth.
So, IE Only, Poor Canada support. I'll pass for now.
"Engineering level accuracy?" What kind of vague marketing speak crap is that? To the millimeter? To the cm? To the meter? (If I hired an engineer to do a building, I'd probably want accuracy to the inch. Does it do that?)
Can someone please put this in terms of "Libraries of Congress" or "Volkswagens" so I have some sense of perspective??? Help!
I always tend to create the technology behind companies I start, from scratch; but using libraries which are very rich, and becoming better all the time. Modularization and improved libraries, tends to blur the lines of what "from scratch" means. Even a raw C program that uses the standard C library, isn't technically "from scratch," since it leverages the work of others in the libs.
This could be a big boon for development of Linux ports to these handheld platforms. The hassles of figuring out how to access certan bits of hardware, could be greatly mitigated through the information in these sources. Of course, great care would have to be taken to avoid contamination and legal issues, but I think it's manageable. I'm a bit concerned that it talks about the kernel and "certain device drivers," though.
I experienced the exact thing firsthand in the NT days. I worked for MKS, who provided a suite of Posix/Unix tools and shell for DOS, and OS/2 (at the time). I was tasked with the port to Win32 for NT. Among several other challenges, one particular one that comes to mind was the implementation of the "ps" command. Obviously the Task Manager, and the command-line "ps.exe" command that came with NT had some way of getting the process list.
However, there is no documented API for getting this information. In order for me to create a third party program that listed the processes, I had to reverse engineer (pre-DCMA days) the SYSTEM32\PS.EXE, to see how it got its information (through some undocumented INT call).
It's this type of behaviour that is inappropriate for a monopolistic operating system provider. While they have gotten their wrists slapped (if that) for this in a couple of very narrow situations, they still continue this behaviour in a rampant fashion in every way they can, with very few repercussions.
I see conflicting reports on 2.0's memory usage. In my own "stress tests", where a number of tabs (20-50) are loaded, each showing 50-100 mid-sized digital photos, the memory usage in Task Manager showed a nice stable 100M, but the pagefile space usage went up to 2G, making the system slow and unusable.
What is up with the difference between reported process memory usage in Task manager (which is reasonable) and real pagefile usage (which is horrendous with lots of images)? I've brought this up twice already, and no one has commented on it.
Why not just make 10 the loudest?
This is something about XP that really bothers me, and I consider a design flaw. Several services run together under each svchost.exe process. (Tasklist /svc will show them.)
I have something wrong with my system now, where one of those svchost processes (after while) dies with an unhelpful messages, killing a bunch of other services with it (including ICS/Firewall). They won't restart for me, either. I'm still in the process of disabling services and trying to identify the single one that is causing grief, and bringing others down with it.
And now, according the article, this same behaviour is used as a security exploit. I wonder if my services have been dying from this same exploit being attempted from the outside on my machine.
While Firefox 2.0 might have a small memory foot print reported in task manager (100mb for me) when I open many tabs with memoy images, my swap space usage goes up to over 2g suddenly. What is with all this unreported memory being used??? (When I exite firefox, the page file usage goes back to normal.) The system is unusable in this 2g page file state; looks like it's back to Opera for me.
Penn & Teller did a great show covering Feng shui. (It was pretty funny having several experts on the topic independently do their work, and have absoultey zero consistency between them, for a supposed ancience "science.") The name of their series ("BullSh*t"), pretty much sums it up. I expect a lot of the same would apply for this new science of web science beauty...
It's obvious to them, and anyone, that it's targeted to them, so the fact it's on a magazine, should carry no more weight than a simple office memo, but far more expensive and time consuming to produce. Are their executives really that stupid and impressionable from a print ad??
Stupidist idea I've seen in awhile. Hard to believe Unisys is still dominating the computing industry, despite these brilliant ideas. Oh, wait...
However, I have an application where I have a number of tabs (a couple of dozen), open to pages with many JPG images in them. Suprisingly, most browsers choke on this. The best so far is Opera, but even it starts to choke when many JPG's are on the tabs at once. So I was excited to try the new Firefox.
Well, with a couple of dozen tabs open, the memory footprint of Firefox.exe was nice and low, under a meg. However, system performance was *terrible*. Looking at the Task Manager, over 2G of swap space was in use (hence the choking of the system). As I closed the tabs with the images on them, the swap space usage went down.
Does anyone know what's going on here??? Images on web pages surely can be cached on disk, and displayed as needed, rather than choking up swap space. And if it is Firefox using (virtual) memory to hold those images, why isn't that showing up in the task manager memory usage entry for the process? (Does TM show more of a "RMEM" statistic versus "VMEM"?) It's very frustrating.
The best browser by far for this scenario, is still Opera. It handles many large JPG's very well. At a certain point, it starts failing to render them in some circumstances (paging around won't render them, but if you slowly scroll, they will display). I wonder if there might be some GDI resource allocation limitation going on? Might it be a limit that could be upped?
It seems like such a basic test, but so many browsers fall down on it.
Great comback, Janet!
I was pretty surprised at the abruptness of the dismissal, but if there would have been another 10 interviews before reaching "2nd round," as some say, then I'm glad I dropped out at the fourth interview. It's a bit of a shame, I think my skill set, background, and technical approach would have been very well suited to google, and helped them.
But the opportunities in this industry are endless, so life goes on :)
I concur. However, I find Wiki's searching to be a little lame as compared to google, so I end up just doing a google search for what I want, and also stick "wiki" or "wikipedia" as a search term, too, and usually the first result is the wikipedia article. Works like a charm almost all of the time. (And sometimes, you end up stumbling across non-wikipedia but specialized wikis for the topic at hand, which isn't a bad thing :)
Reminds me of a comedian I once saw. "I'm dating this new girl now... Well, actually, I'm still just stalking her..."
I would say it's because it's preying on the ultimately innocent. Just as stomping on innocent and cute newborn puppies or kitties would be seen as far more evil than shooting a dangerous (and therefore, in our eyes, culpable) predatory animal such as a coyote, hurting the most innocent portion of our society, who are growing and learning with enthusiasm, understandably makes us see red.
Ashley was grounded so she couldn't talk to us on the phone for this report.
A real beer^h^h^h^hmilk-through-the-nose moment for me.
(Ironically, as a "common carrier", if we were to actively scan for illegal content, we could be held responsible for ensuring *all* the content was proper, and unbearable risk for an online business of any size. So instead, we simply responded to complains, which thankfully were pretty thorough and efficient.)
He only got a few years state time for abusing these poor kids. (It was heartbreaking seeing these poor kids in the witness "green room", and the effect he had on their lives.) The ironic-yet-ultimately-rewarding part, was that for using the Internet for distribution of child porn on our site (a federal offence, since it crossed state lines), he got *life* in prison, with no chance of parole. I was very proud to be part of that process, and helping get this creep off the street is really the most meaningful, and main lasting accomplishment of my Bubble 1.0 experience.
(It was a bit chilling hearing the state trooper with his southern drawl saying "if I had known what this feller had done when I arrested him, I could have saved us all a lot of trouble." I also was told that this creep probably wouldn't last terribly long in prison, once the other inmates found out what he did. Normally, I'm not up for vigilante justice, but when it comes to hurting innocent children, I gotta say the lines sure do blur.)
Sony bad. Nintendo good.