That's not a problem with GUIs in general, that's a problem with one example of a (badly implemented) GUI. The problem you documented would be solved by simply providing a keyboard shortcut (perhaps even using the same chord as in the terminal version) to change between tabs. GUIs are prefectly capable of being fast, intuitive and keyboard-driven.
If the come to the interview dressed like crap, they're automatically out. If they turn up late, they're automatically out.
It's facinating to me the utter-crap voodoo that some people having in making hiring decisions. People like yourself actually believe there's these simple little tests that seperate the good from the bad.
In a service industry, turning up late and looking like shit has an economic cost - it loses you customers. Therefore being late and looking like shit makes you bad at the job. That is not voodoo. In any industry being unreliable has an economic cost. What industry is there where saying you'll do somthing by a certain point in time and not delivering not a problem? They even get tired of that in academia eventually.
Have you ever actually been an employee or employer?
Am I the only one who can remember that we put a lander on Titan a good 18 months prior to taking this image? The presence of liquid methane on the surface was confirmed one week later. Nice image, bad caption.
That 0.1W was for cooling one square centimetre of some unspecified material at an unspecified temperature by some unspecified amount. That's simply not enough information to say anything at all about the cooling performance, certainly not enough to compare it to some other cooling system. You at least need to know what it was cooling, how hot it was and how much it was cooled by. Other relevant details (air temperature, pressure and humidity; material being cooled...) would be ideal, but we can make reasonable assumptions about those details.
You do realise that using that process all you'd get is a list of every possible message the same length as the original message, right? It would still be impossible to know which of the numerous possible coherent messages it was - there is simply no way to distinguish "bribe the president" from "shoot the president", for example.
Does the laptops and sat phones come with a t-shirt that says "American Spy" on it? I guess not, as just carrying a laptop and sat phone around in many parts of the world is equivalent to a t-shirt which says "American Spy" on it in big, orange letters.
While you don't have as much time for gaming, it is still more convenient than the more...traditional ways of entertaining one self.
I find I can balance family life with gaming and masturbation perfectly well. It's a really question of planning and sticking to that plan. Or the plan sticking to you.
On the other hand, one should never perform labor for others for free or without expecting something in return.
For many people, thanks or a sense of satisfaction are often sufficient 'something in return'. It would be a pretty unpleasant an inefficient world if the majority expected or demanded some other reward for giving directions, holding a door open or allowing a car to pull in.
However, there is nothing 'selfish' about expecting and/or demanding compensation.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
selfish, adjective
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure : I joined them for selfish reasons.
P2P has one major problem - most broadband connections are asymmetric. Very, very asymmetric - ratios of 10:1 download:upload are common. Thus, in order for P2P to be able to saturate downstream bandwidth everyone would need to keep their P2P apps open for 10 times as long as it takes to download what they want. I don't think you're ever going to get a useful proportion of people to do this without a definite incentive. The cost of the bandwidth per movie is pretty small - I'd guess a few tens of cents. So econmically that's the value of the incentive you can offer. Are people really going to leave their PC on or an application open for hours and hours when they're not using it for the few tens of cents worth of incentive it would be economic to provide? I just don't see you average consumer doing this. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth from a major ISP than it is to 'buy' a hundred million tiny chunks of bandwidth from ten million customers. P2P works if people know they're helping the 'community' or getting something for free. Linux ISOs? P2P. Warez? P2P. Official Disney movies? Not so much.
If you want to reduce bandwidth usage then reduce the number of packets you have to send. Multicast is the right answer. MBone and IPV6 have been around for a long time now. They just aren't very profitable for ISPs, so the push will have to come from the content providers.
yeah I hate shoddy products - which is why I stick to MS products even though I know Linux quite well and regularly try compeditors in other apps. I want an OS that isn't in my face - I want it to run tasks without me having to KNOW i am running an OS... MS is the least shoddy there (Mac may be better - i can't get hold of it).
You have to ask yourself why there is no decent competition to Microsoft Office (though I'd argue that for most users there are plenty of options). It's because Microsoft has systematically, sometimes illegally, destroyed the competition. Now they have a monopoly there is no incentive to improve their product. Instead, they must do what they can to force people to upgrade (like breaking the file format to make old versions incompatible). None of us know what office suites would be like in a world without Microsoft's abusive dominance, but if you believe competition encourages innovation then the answer must surely be 'better than Office is now'.
The password system you just invented is pretty much equivalent to the 'two factor authentication' which has been in use for many years. It boils down to 'something you have plus something you know'; the most common implementation is a portable (key-chain or credit-card sized) device which displays a 'constantly' changing code - you need both the code from the device and your password to authenticate. So 'a fix like that' actually was used a long time ago and is increasingly commonly used. I guess that means it really is a problem, at least for people with something important to protect.
The only debate (for the rest of us at least) is over what constitutes a derivative work. If you think a driver written for (specifically for) the Linux kernel isn't a derivative work of the Linux kernel you are in very small minority - in fact you are the only person to express that opinion in all the years I have been following the debate. The grey area is over works which were not written for Linux which have had a compatibility layer added. The drivers in question were not written for Linux, they were written for other operating systems and have had wrappers created which allow them to work with Linux. Those wrappers are quite clearly derivative works of the kernel and are invariably under the GPL as a result.
Back in the day, we were seeing 10-20X improvements over spinning media in Random Access. 4x is almost not worth it, depending on price - give spinning media another year or two and they'll match that gain.
By that reasoning, the 20ms seek time of the drive I bought in 2000 should have been reduced to a couple of hundred microseconds by now. Back in the real world, I see that seek times for desktop consumer drives are around the 10ms mark, which is pretty much where they were a year or two ago. History provides no evidence to back up your assertion that hard drive random access performance will improve by a factor of 4 in 'a year or two'. Is there some new tech in the pipeline which will lead to a dramatic reduction in hard drive seek time?
No, this drive will be worse for boot up time. Boot time is a function of how fast info can be pulled off the drive, and this thing is modestly slower than hard drives.
Crap. There isn't a PC OS in existence which boots just by reading consecutive sectors from disk, which would need to be the case for streaming performance to be the dominating factor. Just listen to your drive when it boots up - every drive on every machine with every OS I've ever used had virtually constant seek noise during boot. I'm sure you can find tools which will tell you every file accessed on the disk during boot, but you cold just look at the number of files and their sizes in c:\Windows,/System or wherever your OS files live. Not all get loaded at boot of course, but the point is that they aren't individually very large, generally just a few meg each. A 30s boot where streaming performance was the limiting factor would imply 1.8 GB of data loaded on boot (assuming a 60MB/sec sustained read - just 3MB/sec faster than the Samsumg SSD).
Where a hard drive might win is in resuming from hibernation. There you actually do 'boot' pretty much by loading one huge file into RAM, so streaming performance dominates. At least, it does if your filesystem managed to keep all the data together and doesn't require too much overhead in the form of extra seeks.
No, software written for Windows that breaks with a new release isn't violating Microsoft's copyright. I've no idea why you would think it might. Linux uses a different license to Windows, in case you hadn't noticed. If the binary blob was written for Windows then whatever restrctions Microsoft can/do put in place apply. Microsoft do not demand that you release source code for Windows drivers. The GPL on the other hand does demand that you release source code for derivative works, which in the case of Linux includes drivers written for Linux. The question is at what point does a work become a derivative work of the Linux kernel - does modifying the binary driver which is supposedly not made for Linux specifically for the purpose of making it work with Linux enough? None of us know, because none of us are the judge hearing the case that hasn't happened yet.
It's not really possible to lower the speed in the ways they suggest actually.
It would be incredibly trivial to rate-limit Bluetooth 2.0, just as you can rate-limit any other networking stack - you just feed the packets to it more slowly.
"It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine."
Ehm... and who decides what is a down-level machine?
Hopefully not whoever owns the network. I mean, what kind of a world would it be where sysadmins could control who connected to their networks! Allowing sysadmins to keep unpatched Windows boxes off their networks is obviously nothing but pure evil. It's Microsoft, so it must be evil, right?
Of course we do, we invented the game. We even have American Football. It's not very popular though; few Britons can manage to eat non-stop for three hours.
I knew I should have changed that title the moment I posted. My original message, like the title, was overly harsh. Mythbusters do perform scientific studies some of the time. Compared to most of the rest of what's on TV it's a beacon of hope for those of us with a scientific bent, though that says more about the rest of TV than it does Mythbusters. Generally though, they perform unscientific tests in as spectacular a way as possible in order to entertain. It's entertainment with a hint of science, rather than science which is performed in an entertaining way.
If I had an important paper published in a respected scientific journal and someone told me my work was 'worthy of the Mythbusters' I'd punch them in the face.
A fundamental part of his explanation pivots on the following being true:
1/0 = infinity
-1/0 = -infinity
So, according to that, the following would hold:
if 1/0 = infinity
then infinity * 0 = 1
which does not work, for obvious reasons. This I told my teacher in 6th grade.
If you throw away one of the axioms of any system of arithmetic then it shouldn't come as a surprise if your bastardised version of that system is inconsistent and/or incomplete.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a problem with GUIs in general, that's a problem with one example of a (badly implemented) GUI. The problem you documented would be solved by simply providing a keyboard shortcut (perhaps even using the same chord as in the terminal version) to change between tabs. GUIs are prefectly capable of being fast, intuitive and keyboard-driven.
In a service industry, turning up late and looking like shit has an economic cost - it loses you customers. Therefore being late and looking like shit makes you bad at the job. That is not voodoo. In any industry being unreliable has an economic cost. What industry is there where saying you'll do somthing by a certain point in time and not delivering not a problem? They even get tired of that in academia eventually.
Have you ever actually been an employee or employer?
Am I the only one who can remember that we put a lander on Titan a good 18 months prior to taking this image? The presence of liquid methane on the surface was confirmed one week later. Nice image, bad caption.
That 0.1W was for cooling one square centimetre of some unspecified material at an unspecified temperature by some unspecified amount. That's simply not enough information to say anything at all about the cooling performance, certainly not enough to compare it to some other cooling system. You at least need to know what it was cooling, how hot it was and how much it was cooled by. Other relevant details (air temperature, pressure and humidity; material being cooled...) would be ideal, but we can make reasonable assumptions about those details.
You do realise that using that process all you'd get is a list of every possible message the same length as the original message, right? It would still be impossible to know which of the numerous possible coherent messages it was - there is simply no way to distinguish "bribe the president" from "shoot the president", for example.
Does the laptops and sat phones come with a t-shirt that says "American Spy" on it? I guess not, as just carrying a laptop and sat phone around in many parts of the world is equivalent to a t-shirt which says "American Spy" on it in big, orange letters.
You Must Be New Here ®
I find I can balance family life with gaming and masturbation perfectly well. It's a really question of planning and sticking to that plan. Or the plan sticking to you.
Remember, it's only one week till the 10 days of wanking for peace. Touch your sack, not Iraq!
For many people, thanks or a sense of satisfaction are often sufficient 'something in return'. It would be a pretty unpleasant an inefficient world if the majority expected or demanded some other reward for giving directions, holding a door open or allowing a car to pull in.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
selfish, adjective
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure : I joined them for selfish reasons.
P2P has one major problem - most broadband connections are asymmetric. Very, very asymmetric - ratios of 10:1 download:upload are common. Thus, in order for P2P to be able to saturate downstream bandwidth everyone would need to keep their P2P apps open for 10 times as long as it takes to download what they want. I don't think you're ever going to get a useful proportion of people to do this without a definite incentive. The cost of the bandwidth per movie is pretty small - I'd guess a few tens of cents. So econmically that's the value of the incentive you can offer. Are people really going to leave their PC on or an application open for hours and hours when they're not using it for the few tens of cents worth of incentive it would be economic to provide? I just don't see you average consumer doing this. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth from a major ISP than it is to 'buy' a hundred million tiny chunks of bandwidth from ten million customers. P2P works if people know they're helping the 'community' or getting something for free. Linux ISOs? P2P. Warez? P2P. Official Disney movies? Not so much.
If you want to reduce bandwidth usage then reduce the number of packets you have to send. Multicast is the right answer. MBone and IPV6 have been around for a long time now. They just aren't very profitable for ISPs, so the push will have to come from the content providers.
You have to ask yourself why there is no decent competition to Microsoft Office (though I'd argue that for most users there are plenty of options). It's because Microsoft has systematically, sometimes illegally, destroyed the competition. Now they have a monopoly there is no incentive to improve their product. Instead, they must do what they can to force people to upgrade (like breaking the file format to make old versions incompatible). None of us know what office suites would be like in a world without Microsoft's abusive dominance, but if you believe competition encourages innovation then the answer must surely be 'better than Office is now'.
The password system you just invented is pretty much equivalent to the 'two factor authentication' which has been in use for many years. It boils down to 'something you have plus something you know'; the most common implementation is a portable (key-chain or credit-card sized) device which displays a 'constantly' changing code - you need both the code from the device and your password to authenticate. So 'a fix like that' actually was used a long time ago and is increasingly commonly used. I guess that means it really is a problem, at least for people with something important to protect.
The only debate (for the rest of us at least) is over what constitutes a derivative work. If you think a driver written for (specifically for) the Linux kernel isn't a derivative work of the Linux kernel you are in very small minority - in fact you are the only person to express that opinion in all the years I have been following the debate. The grey area is over works which were not written for Linux which have had a compatibility layer added. The drivers in question were not written for Linux, they were written for other operating systems and have had wrappers created which allow them to work with Linux. Those wrappers are quite clearly derivative works of the kernel and are invariably under the GPL as a result.
By that reasoning, the 20ms seek time of the drive I bought in 2000 should have been reduced to a couple of hundred microseconds by now. Back in the real world, I see that seek times for desktop consumer drives are around the 10ms mark, which is pretty much where they were a year or two ago. History provides no evidence to back up your assertion that hard drive random access performance will improve by a factor of 4 in 'a year or two'. Is there some new tech in the pipeline which will lead to a dramatic reduction in hard drive seek time?
I like CowboyNeal too, but not that much.
Crap. There isn't a PC OS in existence which boots just by reading consecutive sectors from disk, which would need to be the case for streaming performance to be the dominating factor. Just listen to your drive when it boots up - every drive on every machine with every OS I've ever used had virtually constant seek noise during boot. I'm sure you can find tools which will tell you every file accessed on the disk during boot, but you cold just look at the number of files and their sizes in c:\Windows, /System or wherever your OS files live. Not all get loaded at boot of course, but the point is that they aren't individually very large, generally just a few meg each. A 30s boot where streaming performance was the limiting factor would imply 1.8 GB of data loaded on boot (assuming a 60MB/sec sustained read - just 3MB/sec faster than the Samsumg SSD).
Where a hard drive might win is in resuming from hibernation. There you actually do 'boot' pretty much by loading one huge file into RAM, so streaming performance dominates. At least, it does if your filesystem managed to keep all the data together and doesn't require too much overhead in the form of extra seeks.
No, software written for Windows that breaks with a new release isn't violating Microsoft's copyright. I've no idea why you would think it might. Linux uses a different license to Windows, in case you hadn't noticed. If the binary blob was written for Windows then whatever restrctions Microsoft can/do put in place apply. Microsoft do not demand that you release source code for Windows drivers. The GPL on the other hand does demand that you release source code for derivative works, which in the case of Linux includes drivers written for Linux. The question is at what point does a work become a derivative work of the Linux kernel - does modifying the binary driver which is supposedly not made for Linux specifically for the purpose of making it work with Linux enough? None of us know, because none of us are the judge hearing the case that hasn't happened yet.
Death to the twenty-toed mutants!
It would be incredibly trivial to rate-limit Bluetooth 2.0, just as you can rate-limit any other networking stack - you just feed the packets to it more slowly.
Hopefully not whoever owns the network. I mean, what kind of a world would it be where sysadmins could control who connected to their networks! Allowing sysadmins to keep unpatched Windows boxes off their networks is obviously nothing but pure evil. It's Microsoft, so it must be evil, right?
Of course we do, we invented the game. We even have American Football. It's not very popular though; few Britons can manage to eat non-stop for three hours.
The message I wrote and deleted, not the one I actually posted. There should be some kind of a preview function on this damn site...
I knew I should have changed that title the moment I posted. My original message, like the title, was overly harsh. Mythbusters do perform scientific studies some of the time. Compared to most of the rest of what's on TV it's a beacon of hope for those of us with a scientific bent, though that says more about the rest of TV than it does Mythbusters. Generally though, they perform unscientific tests in as spectacular a way as possible in order to entertain. It's entertainment with a hint of science, rather than science which is performed in an entertaining way.
If I had an important paper published in a respected scientific journal and someone told me my work was 'worthy of the Mythbusters' I'd punch them in the face.
If you throw away one of the axioms of any system of arithmetic then it shouldn't come as a surprise if your bastardised version of that system is inconsistent and/or incomplete.
In his new system of arithmetic, axiom 16 is:
infinity * 0 = nullity