MOST regular fuel-injection systems will still work, even with the brain fried.
I'm not so sure about that. Granted I only have a sample size of one, but once while my father and I were driving to work (back when I interned at the same company he worked at, so in the same car), the accelerator suddenly dropped to about half power right smack in the middle of the highway (the Beltway, for those in the Washington DC area). Fortunately we were close to an exit and were able to half-coast off and to a service station. It turned out that the engine itself was okay, but a wire connecting a sensor to the mainboard was half-severed and delivering bad signals, causing the electronics to get the fuel/air mixture wrong and thus reducing acceleration.
Now, it may be that car technology just wasn't as good at the time, or that cars can handle complete failures but not partial ones, or whatever, but frankly I wouldn't count on cars doing well without their brains.
So I guess it's a good thing I live in Tokyo now, so all I have to deal with is getting squeezed to death in rush-hour trains when they stop and everybody panics.
I'd much rather the Americans implemented a system like the Israelis have.
I wouldn't. Ideally, of course, one would want to avoid angering people so much that they want to suicide-bomb you, but even when you can't, it's hardly an everyday occurrence (at least in the US); just think of it as one of the risks of flying. If it bothers you, then don't fly.
I know that if the US implemented a system like Israel, I'd have serious second thoughts about flying over to see my family...
The idea that IBM would use "innocent infringement" as a defense is utter nonsense. This not a defense at all. It sounds like a trap. SCO and Canopy would be very happy to lure IBM in this kind of admission of guilt.
I think you're misreading the article. As I read it, the article isn't suggesting that IBM would itself use the "innocent infringement" argument as a defense; it's saying that if IBM knew that a Canopy company had used that argument, which implies that said company acknowledged the validity of the GPL, then IBM could use that fact as a defense against SCO's claims that the GPL is invalid.
The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons...
Which is why I said "ordinary users (i.e. anyone who doesn't have to deal with TLBs, memory pages, disk sectors and the like)". Ordinary users don't care about engineering reasons. (And as others have pointed out, there's nothing that requires memory to consist of a power-of-two number of elements; that's simply a convenient way to build it.)
On the other hand, I do work with that low level stuff, and I expect I'm going to be patching fdisk back to 1024-byte units for the foreseeable future... <shrug>
I'm saying that the world should adopt 1kB = 1000 bytes, and that getting the world to do so would be nearly as difficult as getting the USA to switch to metric.
As far as ordinary users (i.e. anyone who doesn't have to deal with TLBs, memory pages, disk sectors and the like) are concerned, there's really no reason left to use binary units; 2^9 bytes per sector, 8 sectors per filesystem block, etc. are all low-level conveniences that the user shouldn't have to even notice. Though I personally am too used to the binary units to switch easily, the vast majority of users probably wouldn't even notice the difference, aside from their computers finally reporting the right size for their hard disks. Granted, overcoming the huge momentum for binary units will be difficult, but one could always consider it practice for getting the USA to accept metric.
Studies have shown [...] that programmers are capable of writing approximately the same number of lines of code per unit of time in whatever language they program in.
I intentionally never said anything about how long it would take. (On reflection, I should have explicitly noted that.) Yes, it takes longer to write a program in assembler than in C, for example, and longer in C than in Python. That in and of itself does not affect the quality of the end product; I've seen some really horrible Perl code, and some really clean C code. For some projects, or parts of projects, the efficiency gained by using C (or even assembler) may be worth the extra time it takes.
Programmers no matter how experienced, are going to make mistakes. What matters is how costly those mistakes are. And they cost a whole lot more in C than in Java.
This is true, but smart programmers will be aware of those pitfalls and code around them. Someone (can't recall the URL) put together an entire string library for C that uses dynamic allocation, which would avoid probably 99% of buffer overflow errors.
In the end, it's a matter of choosing the right language for the task. If you need it done fast, use Python, Perl, or whatnot; if you're doing stuff with lists, use Lisp; if you need efficiency, use C or assembler; and so on. Hell, use all of them together. I'm not advocating that everybody should use their favorite language for everything they write; I'm simply trying to put an end to the language holy wars. (Okay, okay, an impossible task, but...)
Am I the only one getting tired of the "my language is better than your language" holy wars? Yes, Java can do some things by default that C can't, by default--buffer overflow checks, for example--but that doesn't make it necessarily "better". One could argue that Java's way of checking everything for you makes programmers lazy, and more likely to make mistakes that Java can't catch--cross-scripting holes, for example.
In the end, an experienced C programmer can get the same job done with the same quality in C as an experienced Java program can in Java, and that ought to be good enough for anybody.
this is already commonplace. Every few days I get a spam on my cell phone saying "you owe us X yen for site usage fees, pay up within 24 hours or we will take legal action". There used to be a lot of people taken in by them, but these days almost nobody believes them anymore.
The summary doesn't mention it, but not only do they scan everything you get, they forward it to you once you're somewhere you can receive it, so you still have the paper originals. And for those who are paranoid about having confidential documents sent via E-mail, they let you cut the scanning step out and just treat it as an ordinary forwarding address.
It doesn't say anything about whether they're offering this to people outside of Australia, but it's certainly interesting for those of us who move frequently. I wonder if this will start a "permanent postal address hosting" service genre like Hotmail did with E-mail.
I may have no clue what I'm talking about, but my impression was that they plan to get the dots really small, to the point where the eye can't distinguish them as individual points--then your eye just takes the average and gets whatever color was intended. They said something similar in the article with respect to getting clean shades of grey.
If you think about it, even regular ink works the same way--whatever size it is, if you have a dot of ink on the paper then it's going to obscure whatever's below it. (Or maybe things work differently at the molecular level? IANAPhysicist.)
I'll still take real dead trees over electronic paper for my leisure reading, I think, but how about the opposite application: writing? "Print" a document to the paper, mark it up in a meeting, and have the changes all saved without having to go back and mark it up again on your PC. Alternatively, take the paper to your favorite country getaway, write up a story, and (assuming your handwriting is decently legible) have it automatically OCR'd into text for later editing, without needing to lug a laptop around and all the associated annoyances.
Good point; I hadn't considered that case. Still, how are you going to be certain the OS starts up and the hardware works correctly without testing it--and once you've tested it, why not keep the image around? With 200-300G HDDs available for cheap, even storing 480 images would be feasible using sparse files.
Fifty-five percent of the computers sold today are "white boxes" meaning they don't carry a brand name. They are typically assembled by small to medium size companies.
s/OEMs/small to medium size companies/ in my previous post, and it still holds; unless these are really small companies, that only put out a few boxes a month or something, it'll still take not significantly more time and be more reliable to configure and image instead of using preloaded installers. Unless the companies in question have absolutely no computer expertise, and would Lindows really want to trust its reputation to such companies?
At any rate, I have trouble seeing what Lindows is trying to accomplish with this move, outside of PR. Joe Sixpack will never buy his own drive, or at least his own system drive, and DIY people will, well, do it themselves. I'm sure it would be easier, and less failure-prone at that, to let OEMs install and configure for their hardware and then image their drives rather than hope that a preloaded OS on the HDD will work.
Whether it's SiteFinder, Google, or even Slashdot, the issue is not so much (or at least not only) the fact that a website comes up instead of a 404. It's the fact that practically everything automated breaks because this "service" is oriented toward humans. Consider:
"Automatic domain completion" in browsers, where you can type "slashdot" and get it completed to "http://slashdot.org/" if slashdot.{com,net} don't exist. This will fail to work because DNS will no longer return NXDOMAIN for nonexistent domains. (Admittedly, with everyone and his brother registering.com domains this is something of a straw man...)
Spam filters. Many server admins have installed a filter that denies mail with a From: address in a nonexistent domain. With Verisign answering every.com/.net query with an A record, these filters have become essentially useless.
I'm sure there are others, but the point is that what's good for human users is not good for computers, and it should be the client, i.e. the thing interacting directly with the human user, that interprets the computer responses and makes them easier to use for humans. (There wouldn't be nearly as much uproar over this if Verisign had, say, made a deal with Microsoft to redirect all NXDOMAIN queries to SiteFinder; in that case it would be an Internet Explorer, i.e. client issue, and DNS itself would be unharmed.)
Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...
So, um, don't play it. That was easy.
I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.
Just because you don't like it, don't call people who do "weird geeks". (Think bombs and Islam.) I play Final Fantasy XI, though infrequently, and the fun thing--the whole point, really--is playing together with other people. The game just provides the medium.
Slashdot Mirror
If the system allows copying to a limit of 3 machines, like the Apple iTunes DRM, that wouldn't be unreasonable.
Yup, and 640k should be enough for anybody.
MOST regular fuel-injection systems will still work, even with the brain fried.
I'm not so sure about that. Granted I only have a sample size of one, but once while my father and I were driving to work (back when I interned at the same company he worked at, so in the same car), the accelerator suddenly dropped to about half power right smack in the middle of the highway (the Beltway, for those in the Washington DC area). Fortunately we were close to an exit and were able to half-coast off and to a service station. It turned out that the engine itself was okay, but a wire connecting a sensor to the mainboard was half-severed and delivering bad signals, causing the electronics to get the fuel/air mixture wrong and thus reducing acceleration.
Now, it may be that car technology just wasn't as good at the time, or that cars can handle complete failures but not partial ones, or whatever, but frankly I wouldn't count on cars doing well without their brains.
So I guess it's a good thing I live in Tokyo now, so all I have to deal with is getting squeezed to death in rush-hour trains when they stop and everybody panics.
Mountains of evidence? I'd like to meet you in person, just so that I can call you a liar to your face.
YHBT, I think. Though I wouldn't put it past Emperor Buh, seeing what various dictators have done in the past...
Completely off-topic, but I laughed myself hoarse at this:
Emperor Buh
Maybe I should ask my American friends if they're planning to vote for "President Buh" next year...
I'd much rather the Americans implemented a system like the Israelis have.
I wouldn't. Ideally, of course, one would want to avoid angering people so much that they want to suicide-bomb you, but even when you can't, it's hardly an everyday occurrence (at least in the US); just think of it as one of the risks of flying. If it bothers you, then don't fly.
I know that if the US implemented a system like Israel, I'd have serious second thoughts about flying over to see my family...
http://achurch.org/lists.tar.bz2 (until I get slashdotted)
Why should you be any different when doing business on the web?
E-commerce is not the entirety of the Internet.
The idea that IBM would use "innocent infringement" as a defense is utter nonsense. This not a defense at all. It sounds like a trap. SCO and Canopy would be very happy to lure IBM in this kind of admission of guilt.
I think you're misreading the article. As I read it, the article isn't suggesting that IBM would itself use the "innocent infringement" argument as a defense; it's saying that if IBM knew that a Canopy company had used that argument, which implies that said company acknowledged the validity of the GPL, then IBM could use that fact as a defense against SCO's claims that the GPL is invalid.
Or I could be way off base . . .
The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons ...
Which is why I said "ordinary users (i.e. anyone who doesn't have to deal with TLBs, memory pages, disk sectors and the like)". Ordinary users don't care about engineering reasons. (And as others have pointed out, there's nothing that requires memory to consist of a power-of-two number of elements; that's simply a convenient way to build it.)
On the other hand, I do work with that low level stuff, and I expect I'm going to be patching fdisk back to 1024-byte units for the foreseeable future... <shrug>
I'm saying that the world should adopt 1kB = 1000 bytes, and that getting the world to do so would be nearly as difficult as getting the USA to switch to metric.
As far as ordinary users (i.e. anyone who doesn't have to deal with TLBs, memory pages, disk sectors and the like) are concerned, there's really no reason left to use binary units; 2^9 bytes per sector, 8 sectors per filesystem block, etc. are all low-level conveniences that the user shouldn't have to even notice. Though I personally am too used to the binary units to switch easily, the vast majority of users probably wouldn't even notice the difference, aside from their computers finally reporting the right size for their hard disks. Granted, overcoming the huge momentum for binary units will be difficult, but one could always consider it practice for getting the USA to accept metric.
Studies have shown [...] that programmers are capable of writing approximately the same number of lines of code per unit of time in whatever language they program in.
I intentionally never said anything about how long it would take. (On reflection, I should have explicitly noted that.) Yes, it takes longer to write a program in assembler than in C, for example, and longer in C than in Python. That in and of itself does not affect the quality of the end product; I've seen some really horrible Perl code, and some really clean C code. For some projects, or parts of projects, the efficiency gained by using C (or even assembler) may be worth the extra time it takes.
Programmers no matter how experienced, are going to make mistakes. What matters is how costly those mistakes are. And they cost a whole lot more in C than in Java.
This is true, but smart programmers will be aware of those pitfalls and code around them. Someone (can't recall the URL) put together an entire string library for C that uses dynamic allocation, which would avoid probably 99% of buffer overflow errors.
In the end, it's a matter of choosing the right language for the task. If you need it done fast, use Python, Perl, or whatnot; if you're doing stuff with lists, use Lisp; if you need efficiency, use C or assembler; and so on. Hell, use all of them together. I'm not advocating that everybody should use their favorite language for everything they write; I'm simply trying to put an end to the language holy wars. (Okay, okay, an impossible task, but...)
Am I the only one getting tired of the "my language is better than your language" holy wars? Yes, Java can do some things by default that C can't, by default--buffer overflow checks, for example--but that doesn't make it necessarily "better". One could argue that Java's way of checking everything for you makes programmers lazy, and more likely to make mistakes that Java can't catch--cross-scripting holes, for example.
In the end, an experienced C programmer can get the same job done with the same quality in C as an experienced Java program can in Java, and that ought to be good enough for anybody.
this is already commonplace. Every few days I get a spam on my cell phone saying "you owe us X yen for site usage fees, pay up within 24 hours or we will take legal action". There used to be a lot of people taken in by them, but these days almost nobody believes them anymore.
The summary doesn't mention it, but not only do they scan everything you get, they forward it to you once you're somewhere you can receive it, so you still have the paper originals. And for those who are paranoid about having confidential documents sent via E-mail, they let you cut the scanning step out and just treat it as an ordinary forwarding address.
It doesn't say anything about whether they're offering this to people outside of Australia, but it's certainly interesting for those of us who move frequently. I wonder if this will start a "permanent postal address hosting" service genre like Hotmail did with E-mail.
I may have no clue what I'm talking about, but my impression was that they plan to get the dots really small, to the point where the eye can't distinguish them as individual points--then your eye just takes the average and gets whatever color was intended. They said something similar in the article with respect to getting clean shades of grey.
If you think about it, even regular ink works the same way--whatever size it is, if you have a dot of ink on the paper then it's going to obscure whatever's below it. (Or maybe things work differently at the molecular level? IANAPhysicist.)
I'll still take real dead trees over electronic paper for my leisure reading, I think, but how about the opposite application: writing? "Print" a document to the paper, mark it up in a meeting, and have the changes all saved without having to go back and mark it up again on your PC. Alternatively, take the paper to your favorite country getaway, write up a story, and (assuming your handwriting is decently legible) have it automatically OCR'd into text for later editing, without needing to lug a laptop around and all the associated annoyances.
I dunno, sounds good to me . . .
The RIAA is a lose cannon
Is this a "lose" in sense 4 of the Jargon File definition?
A "lose cannon". Seems somehow appropriate...
Cynical? Me? Nah, it's just that I keep seeing the same thing over and over and have given up expecting any better.
Oh, wait...
Good point; I hadn't considered that case. Still, how are you going to be certain the OS starts up and the hardware works correctly without testing it--and once you've tested it, why not keep the image around? With 200-300G HDDs available for cheap, even storing 480 images would be feasible using sparse files.
From the article:
Fifty-five percent of the computers sold today are "white boxes" meaning they don't carry a brand name. They are typically assembled by small to medium size companies.
s/OEMs/small to medium size companies/ in my previous post, and it still holds; unless these are really small companies, that only put out a few boxes a month or something, it'll still take not significantly more time and be more reliable to configure and image instead of using preloaded installers. Unless the companies in question have absolutely no computer expertise, and would Lindows really want to trust its reputation to such companies?
with or without an Lindows
Silent L? Hmm...
At any rate, I have trouble seeing what Lindows is trying to accomplish with this move, outside of PR. Joe Sixpack will never buy his own drive, or at least his own system drive, and DIY people will, well, do it themselves. I'm sure it would be easier, and less failure-prone at that, to let OEMs install and configure for their hardware and then image their drives rather than hope that a preloaded OS on the HDD will work.
So, what's the point of this?
Whether it's SiteFinder, Google, or even Slashdot, the issue is not so much (or at least not only) the fact that a website comes up instead of a 404. It's the fact that practically everything automated breaks because this "service" is oriented toward humans. Consider:
I'm sure there are others, but the point is that what's good for human users is not good for computers, and it should be the client, i.e. the thing interacting directly with the human user, that interprets the computer responses and makes them easier to use for humans. (There wouldn't be nearly as much uproar over this if Verisign had, say, made a deal with Microsoft to redirect all NXDOMAIN queries to SiteFinder; in that case it would be an Internet Explorer, i.e. client issue, and DNS itself would be unharmed.)
I tried your links, and then realized that I've already patched my BIND to kill them...
Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...
So, um, don't play it. That was easy.
I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.
Just because you don't like it, don't call people who do "weird geeks". (Think bombs and Islam.) I play Final Fantasy XI, though infrequently, and the fun thing--the whole point, really--is playing together with other people. The game just provides the medium.