Thirdly, everyone deep down knows that there is something after death.
Bollocks.
Or, in your words, that is an utter falsehood. Nobody knows that there is something after death. Anyone who tells you that they know what you will experience after you die is lying and/or crazy.
We have literally hundreds of servers running Windows 2000, and this DST patch was a major headache.
As the parent noted, Microsoft did not include Win2K in their publicly released update.
There is a freeware utility to apply the DST patch on Win2K machines here (as a bonus, it also supports WinNT).
Note that you may also need to update the Java JRE/JDK.
Check out the documentaries Jesus Camp or Friends of God to see people determined to create some sort of Christian Taliban in the US. Truly chilling stuff.
In recent years, opposition to Abortion, Gay Marriage, Evolution and Global Warming have moved from fringe social issues to central articles of faith for these people.
I'm especially puzzled by the inclusion of Global Warming in the mix: how does a particular stance on climate change get included as a litmus test of Christian values? Is selling out to Big Oil now the eleventh commandment?
If capable word processor is all you need (and you don't feel like installing an entire office suite just to get it), I'd also suggest AbiWord.
There is a lot to like about AbiWord: it's open-source, cross-platform, lightweight, feature-rich, stable, and able to read and write MS Word documents.
I suspect that many of our most vexing engineering problems (efficient energy production and storage, advanced pattern recognition, to name just two) have already been solved at the molecular level by our cells. The answers to these problems are as close as our own DNA.
In college in the late 80s, I double-majored in Computer Science and Biology because I was convinced that the next huge advance in technology would be come from advances in genetic engineering. The Human Genome Project was an exciting first step in that direction, but major advances since then have been disappointingly slow in coming. (I've also been discouraged to see that in recent years, due in large part to resistance from religious fundamentalists in the US, most new developments in this field seem to be coming from Europe and Asia.)
I hope this is the first of many such breakthroughs - our genome is an untapped treasure trove.
In the early 90s, I spent about a year programming MUMPS on DEC VAX minis for a large healthcare company - they ran a huge medical records and billing system implemented entirely in MUMPS. The language was unlike anything else I've used (not in a good way). It's been a long time since I did any work on it (so my apologies if my recollections are incorrect):
It was an interpreted language with only about 20 keywords, each of which was typically abbreviated with a single letter. As you might imagine, code listings appeared to be a random scattering of letters, nearly incomprehensible to someone not familiar with the language.
There was no concept of files - storage was done via built-in b-tree variables. Scope of the variables could be local (temporary and local to your process) or global (permanently stored on disk and accessible by all processes), depending on the syntax of the SET command (S). "SET X" (or actually, "S X=42") set local variable named X, while "S ^X=42" set a global variable named X.
It was possible to accidentally delete an entire database with a three letter command: K ^G : (K)ILL global variable G (One of the programmers inadvertently killed a major production database this way - thank God for backups).
Despite this weirdness, for a time the language was fairly common in some healthcare IT circles. There was also a PC-based implementation of MUMPS, and I believe an updated spec was released sometime in the 90s that bolted on some sort of OOP capability.
As others have pointed out, the 6502 definitely was not the best processor of its day. However, given its dominance in the home computer market at the time, for an entire generation of future IT people, 6502 "machine language" was their first exposure to low-level programming. I was certainly one of them: I taught myself 6502 assembly language at the age of 14 on my C64.
As processors go, the 6502 was certainly an "economy model": with only three registers and a very limited set of instructions and addressing modes, it has been called the first RISC processor. In fact, the 6502 had no instructions for division or multiplication - you had to code them yourself using bit shifts. As an undergrad, I remember that assembly programming for processors with larger instruction sets (such as the elegant 68000 series or even the quirky 80x86) felt downright luxurious compared to the 6502 (Division and multiplication instructions? What a concept!).
Despite its shortcomings, I have fond memories of the 6502 - definitely the "little CPU that could".
Seems like they're attempting to cast a negative connotation to the words "fair use", or at least confuse the term until it loses its meaning. If carefully done, this can take the strength out of their opponents' arguments.
The effectiveness of this can be demonstrated by the conservatives' redefinition of the word "liberal", which nowadays is used pejoratively. Originally, the word had a positive meaning (one with liberal views, supporting individual liberty).
Reminds me of the character Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's book "Contact", who made millions from the invention of a box named "AdNix" that would automatically filter commercials from the user's TV signal. (The book also mentions a second product named "PreachNix" that did the same thing for evangelical TV shows - Sagan was outspoken in his criticism for religious extremism).
At the moment, the system has to capture the interaction from side-on to make its evaluation.
"The system works quite accurately," says Park. Tests were carried out on six different pairs of people performing a total of 54 different staged interactions including hugging, punching, kicking and shaking hands. On average, the system was 80% accurate at identifying these activities correctly.
According to Park, a commercial version of his system could be implemented within the next few years.
Great... so, the system is able to recognize a handful of (no doubt) precisely choreographed side-on silhouettes involving exactly two people... nearly 80% of the time (on average).
What if there are three (or more) people involved? What if one of the persons is facing the camera, or is in 3/4 profile? How about the extreme likelihood that the camera will be mounted above the scene of the action?
Although the results may be interesting in a purely academic sense, to suggest that this can be made into a system that yields practical results in the real-world "in the next few years" is ludicrous.
Of course, there is the much larger ethical and legal issue of whether such a system even should be implemented at all...
The "small, specialist outfits" are precisely the ones who could benefit most from the huge, free exposure that a YouTube provides - they should be embracing this opportunity. Instead, however, they band together (as the JASRAC group in the TFA) and use the same jackboot tactics as their big corporate brethren.
The draconion copyright statutes instituted by the megacorps certainly aren't there to help the little guys - they're there to maintain the status quo. The small outfits should be clamoring for new advertising and distribution channels like YouTube and P2P, but they're not. In their silence they are complicit with the RIAA and MPAA thugs.
some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves
Yeah, that's tough. I mean, corporate copyright holders have spent millions buying politicians to protect their cash streams with the full force of the federal government for 120 years. Clearly it's unreasonable to expect them to stop counting their money and actually expend some effort on their own behalf. Everyone else should be doing it for them!
Political discourse in the US has degenerated to a series of three-second soundbites, focus-group-tested slogans, and "Yo Mama" snaps. The Daily Show uses these same jump-cut techniques to point out the hypocrisy and idiocy prevalent in government and in the "mainstream" media, and it does so in easily-consumed, thought-sized chunks.
A parallel can be drawn to Thomas Nast's drawings in Harper's Weekly, which played an important role in the overthrow of the Tammany Hall Tweed Ring in 1870s New York City. An exasperated Boss Tweed is recorded to have demanded of his henchmen, "Stop them damn pictures. I don't care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures."
I'd suggest that whomever slapped the parent with (-1 Troll) should have saved their mod points for a more worthy cause - defending Carly Fiorina seems a poor use of karma.
Granted, Carly Fiorina wasn't involved in the Dunn affair, but she and Patricia Dunn seem to be part of culture of corruption and greed at HP. While working in Manhattan a few years back, I saw three entire floors' worth of HP IT staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. During this time, Fiorina was cruising around in Gulfstream jets and hobnobbing with celebrities.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard must be spinning in their graves. Dunn and Fiorina are just two more examples of the grasping callousness and hypocrisy that have permeated the top levels of American corporations (and American government, for that matter).
Excellent. For many corporate executive types such as Dunn and her ilk, the consequences for illegal acts are very abstract - at the very worst a resignation, cushioned by a golden parachute of stock options, pensions and benefits. It needs to be forcefully demonstrated to these people that if you commit a crime, you are by definition a criminal, and will be treated as such.
I've been developing grid-based applications for my company (we work in the financial industry) for several years. We chose a grid solution because the nature of our applications lent themselves well to parallel processing. We were able to reduce the processing time of our runs from hours (or even days) to seconds.
Not every application is an ideal candidate for the grid: the problems that scale best are composed of many discrete, independent calculations (think Monte Carlo simulations). Strictly linear processes (step A must finish before step B can proceed) do not fare as well in performance, although they do benefit from the other advantages of grid computing (redundancy and virtualization of resources).
Data movement is one of our biggest challenges. In the (likely) event that your application requires database access, you really need to think carefully about concurrency. The database server may have to contend with hundreds (or thousands) of simultaneous connections from the grid nodes - you probably want to use something like Oracle here, rather than mySQL. Some of the grid platform implementations provide data caching schemes that can help.
Careful error handling is also (even more) critical with the grid. When your application is spread out across a few hundred machines, sooner or later a node will fail - maybe the hardware is flaky, or the network hiccupped, or some dimwit shut down the machine in the middle of the calc. It is unacceptable to lose a whole run just because one node crapped out - the application must be able to recover (automatic retry on node failure). It is also essential to have a centralized means of retrieving error logs from the nodes for post-mortems. Again, your choice of grid platform will likely provide help with this.
Anyone else notice the big HP advertisement at the top the page of TFA: "HP Notebook with Biometric fingerprint sensor - it helps safeguard your data - giving you the peace of mind to get back to business".
The idea that we can end terrorism by treating everyone with "respect" is naïve.
The idea that we can end terrorism at all is naive.
Terrorism is a methodology, not a nationality. It is not a problem that can be solved with armies. The US has been trying this for five years now - how's that been working out, then?
Compare and contrast to the terrorist plot recently foiled in the UK. It shows us that the most effective means of dealing with the problem is steady police work aided primarily by a good intelligence network. What's the best way to gather a circle of people on the "inside" willing to provide information to law enforcement?
If your answer was "waterboarding", sorry - you lose. Seems to me that "respect" is right answer here.
... I wonder how the rank and file Redmond programmers can stomach adding "features" that are so clearly harmful for users, crippling for the OS, and just simply *evil*.
I fully understand that the need to pay the bills and provide for your family can lead to some pretty heavy rationalization and denial. However, I gotta think that the urge to add some sort of back door into the stuff would be pretty damn tempting.
I spend more than enough time staring at a computer screen while I'm working - it's the last place I want to be during the few precious hours a week that are truly "mine".
> What are they getting out of the deal by giving away our rights?
To quote Orwell's 1984:
'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
Slashdot Mirror
Bollocks.
Or, in your words, that is an utter falsehood.
Nobody knows that there is something after death. Anyone who tells you that they know what you will experience after you die is lying and/or crazy.
We have literally hundreds of servers running Windows 2000, and this DST patch was a major headache. As the parent noted, Microsoft did not include Win2K in their publicly released update.
There is a freeware utility to apply the DST patch on Win2K machines here (as a bonus, it also supports WinNT).
Note that you may also need to update the Java JRE/JDK.
Check out the documentaries Jesus Camp or Friends of God to see people determined to create some sort of Christian Taliban in the US. Truly chilling stuff.
In recent years, opposition to Abortion, Gay Marriage, Evolution and Global Warming have moved from fringe social issues to central articles of faith for these people.
I'm especially puzzled by the inclusion of Global Warming in the mix: how does a particular stance on climate change get included as a litmus test of Christian values? Is selling out to Big Oil now the eleventh commandment?
I assume he's referring to the Month of Apple Bugs
If capable word processor is all you need (and you don't feel like installing an entire office suite just to get it), I'd also suggest AbiWord.
There is a lot to like about AbiWord: it's open-source, cross-platform, lightweight, feature-rich, stable, and able to read and write MS Word documents.
I suspect that many of our most vexing engineering problems (efficient energy production and storage, advanced pattern recognition, to name just two) have already been solved at the molecular level by our cells. The answers to these problems are as close as our own DNA.
In college in the late 80s, I double-majored in Computer Science and Biology because I was convinced that the next huge advance in technology would be come from advances in genetic engineering. The Human Genome Project was an exciting first step in that direction, but major advances since then have been disappointingly slow in coming. (I've also been discouraged to see that in recent years, due in large part to resistance from religious fundamentalists in the US, most new developments in this field seem to be coming from Europe and Asia.)
I hope this is the first of many such breakthroughs - our genome is an untapped treasure trove.
As a Comp Sci major, I'll have you know that I deal with Communications and English majors nearly every day.
...laugh - it's a joke!
They also use their college skills to communicate clearly when they ask me, "Do you want fries with that?".
In the early 90s, I spent about a year programming MUMPS on DEC VAX minis for a large healthcare company - they ran a huge medical records and billing system implemented entirely in MUMPS. The language was unlike anything else I've used (not in a good way). It's been a long time since I did any work on it (so my apologies if my recollections are incorrect):
It was an interpreted language with only about 20 keywords, each of which was typically abbreviated with a single letter. As you might imagine, code listings appeared to be a random scattering of letters, nearly incomprehensible to someone not familiar with the language.
There was no concept of files - storage was done via built-in b-tree variables. Scope of the variables could be local (temporary and local to your process) or global (permanently stored on disk and accessible by all processes), depending on the syntax of the SET command (S). "SET X" (or actually, "S X=42") set local variable named X, while "S ^X=42" set a global variable named X.
It was possible to accidentally delete an entire database with a three letter command: K ^G : (K)ILL global variable G (One of the programmers inadvertently killed a major production database this way - thank God for backups).
Despite this weirdness, for a time the language was fairly common in some healthcare IT circles. There was also a PC-based implementation of MUMPS, and I believe an updated spec was released sometime in the 90s that bolted on some sort of OOP capability.
As for me, I got out of it as quick as I could...
As others have pointed out, the 6502 definitely was not the best processor of its day. However, given its dominance in the home computer market at the time, for an entire generation of future IT people, 6502 "machine language" was their first exposure to low-level programming. I was certainly one of them: I taught myself 6502 assembly language at the age of 14 on my C64.
As processors go, the 6502 was certainly an "economy model": with only three registers and a very limited set of instructions and addressing modes, it has been called the first RISC processor. In fact, the 6502 had no instructions for division or multiplication - you had to code them yourself using bit shifts. As an undergrad, I remember that assembly programming for processors with larger instruction sets (such as the elegant 68000 series or even the quirky 80x86) felt downright luxurious compared to the 6502 (Division and multiplication instructions? What a concept!).
Despite its shortcomings, I have fond memories of the 6502 - definitely the "little CPU that could".
Seems like they're attempting to cast a negative connotation to the words "fair use", or at least confuse the term until it loses its meaning. If carefully done, this can take the strength out of their opponents' arguments.
The effectiveness of this can be demonstrated by the conservatives' redefinition of the word "liberal", which nowadays is used pejoratively. Originally, the word had a positive meaning (one with liberal views, supporting individual liberty).
Reminds me of the character Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's book "Contact", who made millions from the invention of a box named "AdNix" that would automatically filter commercials from the user's TV signal. (The book also mentions a second product named "PreachNix" that did the same thing for evangelical TV shows - Sagan was outspoken in his criticism for religious extremism).
What if there are three (or more) people involved? What if one of the persons is facing the camera, or is in 3/4 profile? How about the extreme likelihood that the camera will be mounted above the scene of the action?
Although the results may be interesting in a purely academic sense, to suggest that this can be made into a system that yields practical results in the real-world "in the next few years" is ludicrous.
Of course, there is the much larger ethical and legal issue of whether such a system even should be implemented at all...
Yes, I would - if only for lack of imagination.
The "small, specialist outfits" are precisely the ones who could benefit most from the huge, free exposure that a YouTube provides - they should be embracing this opportunity. Instead, however, they band together (as the JASRAC group in the TFA) and use the same jackboot tactics as their big corporate brethren.
The draconion copyright statutes instituted by the megacorps certainly aren't there to help the little guys - they're there to maintain the status quo. The small outfits should be clamoring for new advertising and distribution channels like YouTube and P2P, but they're not. In their silence they are complicit with the RIAA and MPAA thugs.
Gotta say that I didn't see that one coming.
Political discourse in the US has degenerated to a series of three-second soundbites, focus-group-tested slogans, and "Yo Mama" snaps. The Daily Show uses these same jump-cut techniques to point out the hypocrisy and idiocy prevalent in government and in the "mainstream" media, and it does so in easily-consumed, thought-sized chunks.
A parallel can be drawn to Thomas Nast's drawings in Harper's Weekly, which played an important role in the overthrow of the Tammany Hall Tweed Ring in 1870s New York City. An exasperated Boss Tweed is recorded to have demanded of his henchmen, "Stop them damn pictures. I don't care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures."
I'd suggest that whomever slapped the parent with (-1 Troll) should have saved their mod points for a more worthy cause - defending Carly Fiorina seems a poor use of karma.
Granted, Carly Fiorina wasn't involved in the Dunn affair, but she and Patricia Dunn seem to be part of culture of corruption and greed at HP. While working in Manhattan a few years back, I saw three entire floors' worth of HP IT staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. During this time, Fiorina was cruising around in Gulfstream jets and hobnobbing with celebrities.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard must be spinning in their graves. Dunn and Fiorina are just two more examples of the grasping callousness and hypocrisy that have permeated the top levels of American corporations (and American government, for that matter).
Excellent. For many corporate executive types such as Dunn and her ilk, the consequences for illegal acts are very abstract - at the very worst a resignation, cushioned by a golden parachute of stock options, pensions and benefits. It needs to be forcefully demonstrated to these people that if you commit a crime, you are by definition a criminal, and will be treated as such.
I've been developing grid-based applications for my company (we work in the financial industry) for several years. We chose a grid solution because the nature of our applications lent themselves well to parallel processing. We were able to reduce the processing time of our runs from hours (or even days) to seconds.
Not every application is an ideal candidate for the grid: the problems that scale best are composed of many discrete, independent calculations (think Monte Carlo simulations). Strictly linear processes (step A must finish before step B can proceed) do not fare as well in performance, although they do benefit from the other advantages of grid computing (redundancy and virtualization of resources).
Data movement is one of our biggest challenges. In the (likely) event that your application requires database access, you really need to think carefully about concurrency. The database server may have to contend with hundreds (or thousands) of simultaneous connections from the grid nodes - you probably want to use something like Oracle here, rather than mySQL. Some of the grid platform implementations provide data caching schemes that can help.
Careful error handling is also (even more) critical with the grid. When your application is spread out across a few hundred machines, sooner or later a node will fail - maybe the hardware is flaky, or the network hiccupped, or some dimwit shut down the machine in the middle of the calc. It is unacceptable to lose a whole run just because one node crapped out - the application must be able to recover (automatic retry on node failure). It is also essential to have a centralized means of retrieving error logs from the nodes for post-mortems. Again, your choice of grid platform will likely provide help with this.
Anyone else notice the big HP advertisement at the top the page of TFA: "HP Notebook with Biometric fingerprint sensor - it helps safeguard your data - giving you the peace of mind to get back to business".
The idea that we can end terrorism at all is naive.
Terrorism is a methodology, not a nationality. It is not a problem that can be solved with armies. The US has been trying this for five years now - how's that been working out, then?
Compare and contrast to the terrorist plot recently foiled in the UK. It shows us that the most effective means of dealing with the problem is steady police work aided primarily by a good intelligence network. What's the best way to gather a circle of people on the "inside" willing to provide information to law enforcement?
If your answer was "waterboarding", sorry - you lose. Seems to me that "respect" is right answer here.
... I wonder how the rank and file Redmond programmers can stomach adding "features" that are so clearly harmful for users, crippling for the OS, and just simply *evil*.
I fully understand that the need to pay the bills and provide for your family can lead to some pretty heavy rationalization and denial. However, I gotta think that the urge to add some sort of back door into the stuff would be pretty damn tempting.
I spend more than enough time staring at a computer screen while I'm working - it's the last place I want to be during the few precious hours a week that are truly "mine".
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
- Stephen Colbert
> What are they getting out of the deal by giving away our rights?
To quote Orwell's 1984:
'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'