I have a simple rule: never touch a book whose title is a full sentence.
It's not obvious why it works so well. My working hypothesis is this: The writer had a message so important that even people who don't touch the book should get it. Where to put it? Cram it into the title. The problem is, if it fits in the title, it doesn't need a book, does it? Furthermore, anybody who's that sure his idea is so important is probably wrong about a lot else. Even if the book says more than the title, we have been given a good reason to distrust it before we open it.
If Evolution ends up depending on Mono, I might have to switch to Thunderbird someday. As it is, I have Vim as my editor, running via Evo's Bonobo support, which will probably be going away (maybe it already has in the current version).
I wonder how I'll get Vi editing in the brave new world of modern GUI mailers. Most likely I'll end up back on Mutt. Virtual folders are nice, though. E-mail clients still have a long way to go, for something we spend so much time using.
Anything that makes juries more inclined to ignore eyewitness testimony would be wonderful.
There are actual cases where somebody at the police station on ordinary business got "volunteered" to be in a line-up, the victim chose him, and he ended up convicted despite all physical evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, but juries are inclined to believe it over anything else. Many lawyers like it just for that reason, prosecutors and defenders alike.
Not to disagree with the claims in the first paragraph of the article, I can't imagine how this could possibly be useful to me. Maybe he should have said it would be "incredibly useful" for somebody actually doing web-server-side Java.
Obviously all this water was from the Flood. What, you thought it was just on Earth? This is God we're talking about: every planet in the universe had to have been flooded at the same time.
Of course that explains too why the rovers haven't found anything alive -- they all drowned. None of them could get to Earth to get a ride on the boat, er, ark. (Never mind getting them home afterward.)
That also explains the Fermi Paradox, likewise: probably aquatic radio-using species (who would not, presumably, have drowned) just don't happen very often. Anyway, those more than 6008 light years away haven't been around long enough for their signal to reach us.
The best that can be said for the security of Free Software products is that, by and large, it's way better than the norm in proprietary products. That's saying very little, though. There's enormous room for improvement throughout the entire population of coders.
The saving grace of Free Software is that it's personally embarrassing to have a security hole found in your code. Holes in proprietary products are generally not (publicly) traceable to the culprit. Even when they are, he can generally blame a manager. Not much of Free Software is written by people who don't give a damn.
Re:Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The safe in question was my aunt's father's. She said he didn't bother changing the combination because he knew it was all theater anyway, and the way spies would get secret documents was to get people who had them to hand them over. As it happened, he was right.
She also said that he said General Groves was a real bastard.
This way the NSA could retire all those aging Alpha machines in the Echelon bunkers (the ones that scan every single long-distance or cell call made anywhere for naughty words) and replace them with many, many fewer specialized boxes, instead of buying an equal number of Itaniums.
If your head wasn't hurting before, it should be now. Retire Alphas? Aaaugh! Forestall purchases of Itaniums? Mmmmm. (Thought: when those tens of thousands of Alphas are finally retired, will they show up on Ebay?)
A quick intro to the ideas explained at length in the book may be found at The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, from an article by Gatto published in Whole Earth Review in 1991.
I don't see any reason to use SPF either. It only benefits big ISPs, by keeping spammers from mentioning them in their return addresses. Even then it only works until the spammers hijack the machine of some dumb sap who's a legitimate customer of such an ISP, and send under his name. It does you and me no good at all, either way.
The whole exercise has been a waste of time and attention for all involved, and the sooner it's forgotten, the better.
I found another report indicating that, as suspected, they really were talking about mass. Neptune is not, in fact, over 136,000 miles in diameter. (Neither is Jupiter.)
The strength of gravity doesn't grow as the cube of the radius. It grows linearly with the mass, and as the inverse square of the radius. ("Inverse-square law", remember?) The radius grows as the cube root of mass, given constant density. That means that, assuming earth's density, the gravitational force at the surface matches the radius: 2.5G, in this case.
Double the density (e.g. in case it's made of iron) and you still get only ~4G.
OK, if its density is doubled -- i.e., it's all nickel-iron -- then radius is halved, and gravitation squared, you'd get ~9G. There's no way you'd get enough extra compression to bump the gravity to 14G. (Remember the iron in Earth's core is under great pressure already.) You would need to admix uranium or something, as I noted earlier.
Under normal pressures, U is a little more than twice as dense as Fe, and might be a little more compressible; figure 2.5. Then, you get 9 * 2.5 * 2.5 = 56G for a solid uranium planet of 14 Earth masses.
It says the super-earth is so close to its star that it orbits in 10 days. A nearby gas giant is orbiting at 2 AU. Also, they say the mass is 14 times that of Earth. That would imply a surface gravity of 14G only if it was the same size as Earth, which could only happen if it were made out of uranium or something.
I guess a radius 2.4 times that of Earth, if it's made of the same stuff, or less if it has more iron and less silicates.
It's true that there are lots of Java projects on sourceforge. Of them, though, how many are just wankage for Java monkeys? Of the rest, how many are real projects, and not just a cute name and no code?
The latter is the real problem: by far the majority of projects on sf.net are empty shells. To tell what real Free Software is written in, you have to identify the software that is really being used, and then not just count projects, but count lines of code (or, better, kbytes of object code). Of course, that's work, and hasn't been done since RH 7.1 was current. Even then, the raw numbers count all the Java wankage.
So, try to think of Java programs that are used by anybody but Java monkeys, and that work. No, Eclipse, Jedit, and web server add-ons don't count. What are we left with? Some Windows bittorrent client? Anything else out there? Hello?
What we need in a Linux keyboard is fewer keys. Eliminate all the extra junk, and then use
better keyswitches for the keys remaining. The "happy hacker" keyboard's layout is OK, but its action totally stinks.
Back in the 80s, Apple tried several times to switch to membrane-switch keyboards, and the market always made clear that they were intolerable. It's sad to see hackers accepting them today.
It's not just because it's slow, but the reason it's slow (and Python, nominally 100x slower, isn't) is because of cache footprint. Java's garbage collector scatters storage all over as much address space as it can, so you get no effective locality. If your system ever swaps, it scatters its data all over the disk, too. That's why fake benchmarks always show it as "comparable to C++" (i.e. less than 3x slower) but experience shows you just sit and wait for a Java program.
But the reason it is uncool is because, outside of stuff written just for Java monkeys, there is no Free software to speak of written in it. Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%). Free Software coders have avoided Java for lots of reasons, including its not-really-portability, its bad performance, its hasty and stupid language and library design, its corporate 0wnedness, and their own resistance to hype and idiotic jargon.
Is there a simulator for the TX-1? People talk about how great Sutherland's Sketchpad software was, and it ran on the TX-1. Is there even enough public information to simulate it, and does the Sketchpad code still exist?
[We] don't use stored procedures and MySQL was already 64 bit when we started
Evidently you don't know what the Sabre CIO is saying in Sabre press releases. He specifically reported commissioning special work on both counts. If you never heard about this, maybe it's because there's more than one project at Sabre (imagine that!) and the press releases were about one of those that you're not on. Be glad that some other group within Sabre commissioned and took delivery on the 64-bit work before you got to it.
An iPod looks like an external Firewire drive with an HFS or VFAT file system on it. (People even boot from them!) Of course the AAC files are encrypted, so the in-dash unit vendor would need Apple's help to decode them, just as it would need MS's help to decode WMV.
Most MP3 player gadgets do look like a file system. It's nice to know that Karma doesn't; now I know not to get one.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a simple rule: never touch a book whose title is a full sentence.
It's not obvious why it works so well. My working hypothesis is this: The writer had a message so important that even people who don't touch the book should get it. Where to put it? Cram it into the title. The problem is, if it fits in the title, it doesn't need a book, does it? Furthermore, anybody who's that sure his idea is so important is probably wrong about a lot else. Even if the book says more than the title, we have been given a good reason to distrust it before we open it.
If Evolution ends up depending on Mono, I might have to switch to Thunderbird someday. As it is, I have Vim as my editor, running via Evo's Bonobo support, which will probably be going away (maybe it already has in the current version).
I wonder how I'll get Vi editing in the brave new world of modern GUI mailers. Most likely I'll end up back on Mutt. Virtual folders are nice, though. E-mail clients still have a long way to go, for something we spend so much time using.
There are actual cases where somebody at the police station on ordinary business got "volunteered" to be in a line-up, the victim chose him, and he ended up convicted despite all physical evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, but juries are inclined to believe it over anything else. Many lawyers like it just for that reason, prosecutors and defenders alike.
Not to disagree with the claims in the first paragraph of the article, I can't imagine how this could possibly be useful to me. Maybe he should have said it would be "incredibly useful" for somebody actually doing web-server-side Java.
Of course that explains too why the rovers haven't found anything alive -- they all drowned. None of them could get to Earth to get a ride on the boat, er, ark. (Never mind getting them home afterward.)
That also explains the Fermi Paradox, likewise: probably aquatic radio-using species (who would not, presumably, have drowned) just don't happen very often. Anyway, those more than 6008 light years away haven't been around long enough for their signal to reach us.
The best that can be said for the security of Free Software products is that, by and large, it's way better than the norm in proprietary products. That's saying very little, though. There's enormous room for improvement throughout the entire population of coders.
The saving grace of Free Software is that it's personally embarrassing to have a security hole found in your code. Holes in proprietary products are generally not (publicly) traceable to the culprit. Even when they are, he can generally blame a manager. Not much of Free Software is written by people who don't give a damn.
The safe in question was my aunt's father's. She said he didn't bother changing the combination because he knew it was all theater anyway, and the way spies would get secret documents was to get people who had them to hand them over. As it happened, he was right.
She also said that he said General Groves was a real bastard.
If your head wasn't hurting before, it should be now. Retire Alphas? Aaaugh! Forestall purchases of Itaniums? Mmmmm. (Thought: when those tens of thousands of Alphas are finally retired, will they show up on Ebay?)
A quick intro to the ideas explained at length in the book may be found at The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, from an article by Gatto published in Whole Earth Review in 1991.
I don't see any reason to use SPF either. It only benefits big ISPs, by keeping spammers from mentioning them in their return addresses. Even then it only works until the spammers hijack the machine of some dumb sap who's a legitimate customer of such an ISP, and send under his name. It does you and me no good at all, either way.
The whole exercise has been a waste of time and attention for all involved, and the sooner it's forgotten, the better.
"We just want them to stop using our name," he says.
I agree. Choose a different name, guys. Exercise some creativity.
I found another report indicating that, as suspected, they really were talking about mass. Neptune is not, in fact, over 136,000 miles in diameter. (Neither is Jupiter.)
The strength of gravity doesn't grow as the cube of the radius. It grows linearly with the mass, and as the inverse square of the radius. ("Inverse-square law", remember?) The radius grows as the cube root of mass, given constant density. That means that, assuming earth's density, the gravitational force at the surface matches the radius: 2.5G, in this case.
Double the density (e.g. in case it's made of iron) and you still get only ~4G.
Microsoft Code Has No Bugs
Under normal pressures, U is a little more than twice as dense as Fe, and might be a little more compressible; figure 2.5. Then, you get 9 * 2.5 * 2.5 = 56G for a solid uranium planet of 14 Earth masses.
Assuming radius is 14 ** (1/3) = 2.41 times Earth's, and it's made of the same materials, then surface gravity should be 14 / (2.4 ** 2) = 2.41G also.
Probably it's denser, and radius is smaller, and surface gravity is higher, maybe 3 or 4G, but not 14G.
It says the super-earth is so close to its star that it orbits in 10 days. A nearby gas giant is orbiting at 2 AU. Also, they say the mass is 14 times that of Earth. That would imply a surface gravity of 14G only if it was the same size as
Earth, which could only happen if it were made out of uranium or something.
I guess a radius 2.4 times that of Earth, if it's made of the same stuff, or less if it has more iron and less silicates.
The latter is the real problem: by far the majority of projects on sf.net are empty shells. To tell what real Free Software is written in, you have to identify the software that is really being used, and then not just count projects, but count lines of code (or, better, kbytes of object code). Of course, that's work, and hasn't been done since RH 7.1 was current. Even then, the raw numbers count all the Java wankage.
So, try to think of Java programs that are used by anybody but Java monkeys, and that work. No, Eclipse, Jedit, and web server add-ons don't count. What are we left with? Some Windows bittorrent client? Anything else out there? Hello?
The first sentence above contradicts the one that follows. Java code can hardly be portable if it won't run at all on most potential users' machines.
On machines that are already burdened with JREs, how can your program pick from among them all which one to use?
Back in the 80s, Apple tried several times to switch to membrane-switch keyboards, and the market always made clear that they were intolerable. It's sad to see hackers accepting them today.
But the reason it is uncool is because, outside of stuff written just for Java monkeys, there is no Free software to speak of written in it. Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%). Free Software coders have avoided Java for lots of reasons, including its not-really-portability, its bad performance, its hasty and stupid language and library design, its corporate 0wnedness, and their own resistance to hype and idiotic jargon.
Java killed Freenet in the crib.
Is there a simulator for the TX-1? People talk about how great Sutherland's Sketchpad software was, and it ran on the TX-1. Is there even enough public information to simulate it, and does the Sketchpad code still exist?
I wonder if tumors stop growing during hibernation. If they do, then everybody with (expected-) fatal cancer can just hibernate until there's a cure.
Likewise aging...
Evidently you don't know what the Sabre CIO is saying in Sabre press releases. He specifically reported commissioning special work on both counts. If you never heard about this, maybe it's because there's more than one project at Sabre (imagine that!) and the press releases were about one of those that you're not on. Be glad that some other group within Sabre commissioned and took delivery on the 64-bit work before you got to it.
Time to buy!
It's funny, you can see the zigzags in the downward slope -- people really are thinking that.
An iPod looks like an external Firewire drive with an HFS or VFAT file system on it. (People even boot from them!) Of course the AAC files are encrypted, so the in-dash unit vendor would need Apple's help to decode them, just as it would need MS's help to decode WMV.
Most MP3 player gadgets do look like a file system. It's nice to know that Karma doesn't; now I know not to get one.