I've never seen a shared personal blog. Do these things exist? It seems like it would be nearly as unmanageable as a shared cell phone or a shared ATM card. Usually, people seem to each have blogs, and expect their friends to read both. In fact, all of the blogs I've ever seen written by multiple people have been written by a group of people each of whom have individual blogs, and these have been about non-personal topics.
This sort of article seems to be written by people who pay no attention at all to the relevant technology, on the basis of taking a traditional behavior, replacing an old technology with a new technology, and stating that it's tough to decide whether to go the old behavior, because, on the one hand, it's traditional, and on the other hand, it's a stupid thing that nobody would even consider doing, because the technology obviously doesn't work like that.
Couples twenty years ago didn't develop a shared handwriting so that their Christmas letters would come from the two of them together, and couples today don't need to merge their blogs. They just cross-post things they write together, or link to posts in each other's blogs.
Of course, this is DefCon. You pretty much have to expect that there's law enforcement with probable cause and actual warrants wandering around trying to get leads. It's pretty unlikely that anybody who's good enough to pull anything off is going to tell a stranger anything significant. Probably a lot of the participants were recording stuff, for curiosity, to remember stuff, or to try to identify the good guys or the bad guys. Dateline's tactics are a lot more objectionable in other contexts. I mean, this is the convention where somebody's talk on gmail security involved hijacking an attendee's gmail account on the overhead during the talk.
And, of course, it's exactly the same as the use of facial expressions and informal speech in face-to-face interaction. The (negative) example from the article is one where it would be similarly inappropriate for the other party to look distinctly sad in a face-to-face conversation, so the emoticon version is also bad. Now, maybe some people are using emoticons to express things they wouldn't express in person, indicating a loss of formality due to the medium where it's required, but that's hardly the same thing, and hardly specific to emoticons.
My suspicion of the audio skipping issue is that the fundamental problem is that it goes through too many layers in userspace before getting to the kernel, and that, if you're playing audio through something like arts and also have bursty system load, you'd likely to have something in the audio pathway not get enough time.
Your mythtv boxes are relatively simple to schedule, because there's a certain constant load, and the programs are designed to sacrifice quality as needed to keep up. Furthermore, the tasks that take a lot of processor take it all the time. That's a far cry from using openoffice and firefox while playing music through arts, where obviously interactive tasks ambush the CPU suddenly after being idle for a while. Consider: you do a bunch of data entry, requiring a tiny bit of CPU time whenever you hit a key to update the view of the cell of the spreadsheet. Then you hit recalculate in openoffice, switch to firefox, and reload CNN while you wait for the huge spreadsheet to go. The kernel knows that firefox needs quick responses, and that openoffice needs quick responses, but they're suddenly using a ton of time and the programs in the music pathway get pushed out until the kernel reanalyzes openoffice as a CPU hog and firefox as not about to be idle any time soon and pushes down their priorities.
Personally, I think that "desktop environment" audio handler programs uselessly make it really difficult to schedule things acceptably, and 99% of skips due to tricky loads can be avoided by just using alsa. But that's just my experiences based on the computers I've used and the more workstation-like workload I have (i.e., the CPU hogs are tasks that are always CPU hogs, and the interactive tasks stay interactive).
A PVR is actually very much unlike a desktop, and, in some ways, closer to the enterprise access pattern that gets a lot of performance tuning and benchmarking.
Yes it does. It just only shows the first paragraph on the front page, which I think would have been fine here. That's where the "Read {n} bytes more..." link comes from. With the slashdot audience, the more non-critical information you can hide past the jump, the better for people not getting wrong ideas.
Don't accept the license on GCC (or binutils, or the Linux kernel, or...). When you get any of these, you become the owner of a copy of the software, and you can use that copy under fair use doctorine without any license. The only thing you have to care about are programs and libraries that your plugins compile against (that is, header files, and, if you need to link against anything, whatever you link against).
The GPLv2 (I'm not sure about v3) specificly states that it does not cover using the program; using a GPLv2 program is like reading a book you own, unlike using a proprietary program which is licensed for your use but which you do not own (so that you can be bound by EULA terms). There was a draft of the GPLv3 which was not Free in this sense, but I believe that got fixed.
This blurb needs a paragraph break. The stuff about Patti Santangelo at the end is entirely background and unrelated to the latest developments. The latest developments, discussed in the beginning, are in a case which is still in progress (and back to square one after the RIAA's end run was blocked by the court's sense of fairness). We know this because RIAA is asking to be paid for their trouble in attempting the end run unsuccessfully.
Electrical potential being transferred by protons is less surprising if you call them H+ ions. If you're getting electricity out of hydrogen fuel, chances are that you're moving some H+ ions around. Calling them "protons" is not strictly inaccurate, although it tends to suggest that you're moving them into or out of atoms, which would be a lot more exciting than what's going on here.
I wonder if he used vi or emacs to to write that.... /me ducks
He almost certainly used pico, since he sends email with pine. If he wrote it as a text file outside his mail client, he probably used uemacs, which is what he normally uses for code. (I know the question was rhetorical, but the literal answer is apropos.)
On the linux-kernel mailing list, there was a lot of discussion of patterns that cause bad scheduling decisions with various schedulers, generally focused on making test cases for interactivity problems for workloads people had seen. Since the authors of the paper got their initial hint from having problems with a particular real load, this and the work that Ingo is referring to independantly encountered the same issues.
They took too long to publish this. Linux 2.6.21 (released in April) added support for using one-shot timers instead of a periodic tick, so it avoids the problem like OS X does. In addition to resolving this issue, tickless is important for saving power (because the processor can stay in a low-power state for long enough to get substantial benefits compared to the power cost of starting and stopping) and for virtual hosting (where the combined load of the guest OS scheduler ticks is significant on a system with a large number of idle guests). As a side effect, while the accounting didn't change at that point, the pattern a task has to use to fool the accounting became impossible to guess.
The CFS additionally removes the interactivity boost in favor of giving interactive tasks no extra time but rather just quick access to their available time, which is what they really benefit from.
The new wireless stack has been in development for ages now, testing for half a year, and it's just now being included at all. This is a point release simply because they didn't break wireless in the kernel years ago when they decided to write a new stack, leaving wireless broken for years and years before eventually reaching a point where it only failed to work for people who weren't bothering to complain any more, at which point the version number could change and it would be called "stable", despite the fact that it wouldn't actually work in general.
Including this new wireless stack won't break anything for anybody, because the old wireless stack is still there, and there are no included drivers at all that use the new one.
From a user perspective, it doesn't matter, but a number of drivers for releatively new hardware have been written to use it, which means that there will probably be a bunch more wireless cards supported by the mainstream kernel in the next few versions, and one fewer step to get drivers in 2.6.22. For example, Intel has a new driver for their a/b/g card that doesn't require a userspace regulatory daemon or anything (the firmware takes care of all of that), and this driver uses the new stack; they have plans to get this driver into the mainline kernel, at which point live CDs will start having wifi on new laptops with intel chipsets.
In 2.6.22, the new wireless stack isn't going to make any difference, because they haven't included any drivers that use it yet.
Java 6 and Java 7 are relatively minor changes. As far as I can tell, the issue is that Sun can't deal with having more than one number in versions. When they revised the Java language, they didn't change the 1 to a 2; they added an extra 2 elsewhere in the name. Then when they wanted to do it again, they didn't know what to change, so they initially left everything the same, and then they discarded all of the stuck numbers. This means that they don't have a way to show the difference between adding a few library features and changing big important things. The difference between 5, 6, and 7 is much like the difference between 1.4.0, 1.4.1, and 1.4.2, and it's not worth upgrading unless you happen to care particularly about a new feature.
The satellite is somewhat useful for predicting the intensity, but not the tracks, of cyclones. It's useful for giving storm warnings for non-tropical storms. It's useful for research which improves future forecasts. The complaint is not that QuikSCAT is useless (in fact, the senior forecaster who wrote the article has been calling for a replacement for a long time); it's that it isn't the most important resource threatened by lack of funding. It's also that it would be better to get an improved version up later than to get an identical replacement up immediately.
QuikSCAT was a significant tool in the research work which improved hurricane forecasting in the period since it has been available. But it doesn't contribute greatly to the process of making those forecasts on a daily basis. The daily forecasts are made based primarily on data from hurricane hunters, which the NHC can't afford enough of. And researchers can live with no QuikSCAT data for some time if the replacement is data from a better device later.
His fault is overstating the relative importance of this particular item compared to the rest of his organization's budget. They're worried that Congress will mandate bad funding decisions based on his statements. The problem is that, if you say "I need a bunch of money to do this thing that's really really important" people will say "Here's most of the money; take funding away from less important things and do that thing you said" and the other things actually need the money more.
If you can make some change to the running system image so that it runs code that's not normally accessible, it probably doesn't matter if you know the root password or not, since you must have already found a way to jump to arbitrary code to get there in the first place.
Actually, the reason these passwords won't do you any good is that you don't get any chances to enter them, because it doesn't have a login prompt on anything that's exposed in production phones.
OOXML is only suitable as a standard way of representing old documents, written in old office software, whose precise formatting is important and must be retained when making a more portable representation. At least, that's what ECMA told ISO as for why there should be a second standard document format.
So, if Massachusetts follows these guidelines, it won't be permitted as a format to save new documents in, and will only be used to export archived Word documents. Beats me as to why you'd need to use something other than PDF for such things, since actually editting the document will screw it up much more than converting it to ODF would, but there are various things available as DOC files currently that recipients wouldn't be expected to edit (e.g., the reports on plans for troubled school districts), so there should be a standard replacement for that.
Unfortunately for that idea, it's too wide to plug two into adjacent ports on a hub and too tall to plug into adjacent ports on a computer. They need to offer a version with a mini-USB socket for the device end before you can make a cluster of these.
It's a good thing one has Wikipedia to ask, so one doesn't actually have to complain about slashdot articles.
Actually, somebody should probably make a Firefox extension that lets you left-click on a word and select a menu option to find out what it means without any fuss.
A fraction of a second after this paper was published, it split into an administrative form called a WC329 and a smaller, 108-author paper entitled "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon". The WC329 then split into a pair of grant proposals, cousins of ordinary funding requests. "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon" then emitted a Ph.D. thesis and became a 23-author paper which was nearly published before it decayed into another Ph.D thesis and an ordinary 4-author paper.
Researchers at arxiv were able to reconstruct the form of the original paper by analyzing hundreds of thousands of "personal communicaion" and "in press" citations by physicists distributed around the field.
I thought it was talking about "A la carte indecency". Is that good enough? Unfortunately, I'd rather not see the a la carte indecency that Bill would probably bring.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never seen a shared personal blog. Do these things exist? It seems like it would be nearly as unmanageable as a shared cell phone or a shared ATM card. Usually, people seem to each have blogs, and expect their friends to read both. In fact, all of the blogs I've ever seen written by multiple people have been written by a group of people each of whom have individual blogs, and these have been about non-personal topics.
This sort of article seems to be written by people who pay no attention at all to the relevant technology, on the basis of taking a traditional behavior, replacing an old technology with a new technology, and stating that it's tough to decide whether to go the old behavior, because, on the one hand, it's traditional, and on the other hand, it's a stupid thing that nobody would even consider doing, because the technology obviously doesn't work like that.
Couples twenty years ago didn't develop a shared handwriting so that their Christmas letters would come from the two of them together, and couples today don't need to merge their blogs. They just cross-post things they write together, or link to posts in each other's blogs.
Of course, this is DefCon. You pretty much have to expect that there's law enforcement with probable cause and actual warrants wandering around trying to get leads. It's pretty unlikely that anybody who's good enough to pull anything off is going to tell a stranger anything significant. Probably a lot of the participants were recording stuff, for curiosity, to remember stuff, or to try to identify the good guys or the bad guys. Dateline's tactics are a lot more objectionable in other contexts. I mean, this is the convention where somebody's talk on gmail security involved hijacking an attendee's gmail account on the overhead during the talk.
And, of course, it's exactly the same as the use of facial expressions and informal speech in face-to-face interaction. The (negative) example from the article is one where it would be similarly inappropriate for the other party to look distinctly sad in a face-to-face conversation, so the emoticon version is also bad. Now, maybe some people are using emoticons to express things they wouldn't express in person, indicating a loss of formality due to the medium where it's required, but that's hardly the same thing, and hardly specific to emoticons.
My suspicion of the audio skipping issue is that the fundamental problem is that it goes through too many layers in userspace before getting to the kernel, and that, if you're playing audio through something like arts and also have bursty system load, you'd likely to have something in the audio pathway not get enough time.
Your mythtv boxes are relatively simple to schedule, because there's a certain constant load, and the programs are designed to sacrifice quality as needed to keep up. Furthermore, the tasks that take a lot of processor take it all the time. That's a far cry from using openoffice and firefox while playing music through arts, where obviously interactive tasks ambush the CPU suddenly after being idle for a while. Consider: you do a bunch of data entry, requiring a tiny bit of CPU time whenever you hit a key to update the view of the cell of the spreadsheet. Then you hit recalculate in openoffice, switch to firefox, and reload CNN while you wait for the huge spreadsheet to go. The kernel knows that firefox needs quick responses, and that openoffice needs quick responses, but they're suddenly using a ton of time and the programs in the music pathway get pushed out until the kernel reanalyzes openoffice as a CPU hog and firefox as not about to be idle any time soon and pushes down their priorities.
Personally, I think that "desktop environment" audio handler programs uselessly make it really difficult to schedule things acceptably, and 99% of skips due to tricky loads can be avoided by just using alsa. But that's just my experiences based on the computers I've used and the more workstation-like workload I have (i.e., the CPU hogs are tasks that are always CPU hogs, and the interactive tasks stay interactive).
A PVR is actually very much unlike a desktop, and, in some ways, closer to the enterprise access pattern that gets a lot of performance tuning and benchmarking.
Yes it does. It just only shows the first paragraph on the front page, which I think would have been fine here. That's where the "Read {n} bytes more..." link comes from. With the slashdot audience, the more non-critical information you can hide past the jump, the better for people not getting wrong ideas.
Don't accept the license on GCC (or binutils, or the Linux kernel, or...). When you get any of these, you become the owner of a copy of the software, and you can use that copy under fair use doctorine without any license. The only thing you have to care about are programs and libraries that your plugins compile against (that is, header files, and, if you need to link against anything, whatever you link against).
The GPLv2 (I'm not sure about v3) specificly states that it does not cover using the program; using a GPLv2 program is like reading a book you own, unlike using a proprietary program which is licensed for your use but which you do not own (so that you can be bound by EULA terms). There was a draft of the GPLv3 which was not Free in this sense, but I believe that got fixed.
This blurb needs a paragraph break. The stuff about Patti Santangelo at the end is entirely background and unrelated to the latest developments. The latest developments, discussed in the beginning, are in a case which is still in progress (and back to square one after the RIAA's end run was blocked by the court's sense of fairness). We know this because RIAA is asking to be paid for their trouble in attempting the end run unsuccessfully.
Electrical potential being transferred by protons is less surprising if you call them H+ ions. If you're getting electricity out of hydrogen fuel, chances are that you're moving some H+ ions around. Calling them "protons" is not strictly inaccurate, although it tends to suggest that you're moving them into or out of atoms, which would be a lot more exciting than what's going on here.
I wonder if he used vi or emacs to to write that....
/me ducks
He almost certainly used pico, since he sends email with pine. If he wrote it as a text file outside his mail client, he probably used uemacs, which is what he normally uses for code. (I know the question was rhetorical, but the literal answer is apropos.)
On the linux-kernel mailing list, there was a lot of discussion of patterns that cause bad scheduling decisions with various schedulers, generally focused on making test cases for interactivity problems for workloads people had seen. Since the authors of the paper got their initial hint from having problems with a particular real load, this and the work that Ingo is referring to independantly encountered the same issues.
They took too long to publish this. Linux 2.6.21 (released in April) added support for using one-shot timers instead of a periodic tick, so it avoids the problem like OS X does. In addition to resolving this issue, tickless is important for saving power (because the processor can stay in a low-power state for long enough to get substantial benefits compared to the power cost of starting and stopping) and for virtual hosting (where the combined load of the guest OS scheduler ticks is significant on a system with a large number of idle guests). As a side effect, while the accounting didn't change at that point, the pattern a task has to use to fool the accounting became impossible to guess.
The CFS additionally removes the interactivity boost in favor of giving interactive tasks no extra time but rather just quick access to their available time, which is what they really benefit from.
The new wireless stack has been in development for ages now, testing for half a year, and it's just now being included at all. This is a point release simply because they didn't break wireless in the kernel years ago when they decided to write a new stack, leaving wireless broken for years and years before eventually reaching a point where it only failed to work for people who weren't bothering to complain any more, at which point the version number could change and it would be called "stable", despite the fact that it wouldn't actually work in general.
Including this new wireless stack won't break anything for anybody, because the old wireless stack is still there, and there are no included drivers at all that use the new one.
From a user perspective, it doesn't matter, but a number of drivers for releatively new hardware have been written to use it, which means that there will probably be a bunch more wireless cards supported by the mainstream kernel in the next few versions, and one fewer step to get drivers in 2.6.22. For example, Intel has a new driver for their a/b/g card that doesn't require a userspace regulatory daemon or anything (the firmware takes care of all of that), and this driver uses the new stack; they have plans to get this driver into the mainline kernel, at which point live CDs will start having wifi on new laptops with intel chipsets.
In 2.6.22, the new wireless stack isn't going to make any difference, because they haven't included any drivers that use it yet.
The Year of the Linux Desktop is obviously the one in which Linux use on the desktop hits its peak, before Joe Sixpack switches to Hurd.
Java 6 and Java 7 are relatively minor changes. As far as I can tell, the issue is that Sun can't deal with having more than one number in versions. When they revised the Java language, they didn't change the 1 to a 2; they added an extra 2 elsewhere in the name. Then when they wanted to do it again, they didn't know what to change, so they initially left everything the same, and then they discarded all of the stuck numbers. This means that they don't have a way to show the difference between adding a few library features and changing big important things. The difference between 5, 6, and 7 is much like the difference between 1.4.0, 1.4.1, and 1.4.2, and it's not worth upgrading unless you happen to care particularly about a new feature.
The satellite is somewhat useful for predicting the intensity, but not the tracks, of cyclones. It's useful for giving storm warnings for non-tropical storms. It's useful for research which improves future forecasts. The complaint is not that QuikSCAT is useless (in fact, the senior forecaster who wrote the article has been calling for a replacement for a long time); it's that it isn't the most important resource threatened by lack of funding. It's also that it would be better to get an improved version up later than to get an identical replacement up immediately.
QuikSCAT was a significant tool in the research work which improved hurricane forecasting in the period since it has been available. But it doesn't contribute greatly to the process of making those forecasts on a daily basis. The daily forecasts are made based primarily on data from hurricane hunters, which the NHC can't afford enough of. And researchers can live with no QuikSCAT data for some time if the replacement is data from a better device later.
His fault is overstating the relative importance of this particular item compared to the rest of his organization's budget. They're worried that Congress will mandate bad funding decisions based on his statements. The problem is that, if you say "I need a bunch of money to do this thing that's really really important" people will say "Here's most of the money; take funding away from less important things and do that thing you said" and the other things actually need the money more.
If you can make some change to the running system image so that it runs code that's not normally accessible, it probably doesn't matter if you know the root password or not, since you must have already found a way to jump to arbitrary code to get there in the first place.
Actually, the reason these passwords won't do you any good is that you don't get any chances to enter them, because it doesn't have a login prompt on anything that's exposed in production phones.
OOXML is only suitable as a standard way of representing old documents, written in old office software, whose precise formatting is important and must be retained when making a more portable representation. At least, that's what ECMA told ISO as for why there should be a second standard document format.
So, if Massachusetts follows these guidelines, it won't be permitted as a format to save new documents in, and will only be used to export archived Word documents. Beats me as to why you'd need to use something other than PDF for such things, since actually editting the document will screw it up much more than converting it to ODF would, but there are various things available as DOC files currently that recipients wouldn't be expected to edit (e.g., the reports on plans for troubled school districts), so there should be a standard replacement for that.
Unfortunately for that idea, it's too wide to plug two into adjacent ports on a hub and too tall to plug into adjacent ports on a computer. They need to offer a version with a mini-USB socket for the device end before you can make a cluster of these.
You'd never make it as a weather forecaster, then. They have to work with graphical "products" from QuikSCAT all the time.
It's a good thing one has Wikipedia to ask, so one doesn't actually have to complain about slashdot articles.
Actually, somebody should probably make a Firefox extension that lets you left-click on a word and select a menu option to find out what it means without any fuss.
A fraction of a second after this paper was published, it split into an administrative form called a WC329 and a smaller, 108-author paper entitled "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon". The WC329 then split into a pair of grant proposals, cousins of ordinary funding requests. "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon" then emitted a Ph.D. thesis and became a 23-author paper which was nearly published before it decayed into another Ph.D thesis and an ordinary 4-author paper.
Researchers at arxiv were able to reconstruct the form of the original paper by analyzing hundreds of thousands of "personal communicaion" and "in press" citations by physicists distributed around the field.
I thought it was talking about "A la carte indecency". Is that good enough? Unfortunately, I'd rather not see the a la carte indecency that Bill would probably bring.
Sure, he's giving up TV in one of those steps, and TV is electronic. But what does he do instead? Watches the xkcd movie on zoetrope.