Damn you beat me to it. Even in 2002, it was just a linux/elf rehash of what optimizating asm-geeks have been doing since the dawn of time. I distinctly remember a contest I had with another guy back around 1994 on 486-class machines running MSDOS, to see which of us could write a functional text pager (ala "more", press spacebar to see the next screen of text from standard input) in the fewest bytes possible in the resulting.COM executable. I can't recall the exact numbers, but he beat me by something around 10 bytes, and the numbers were in the neighboorhood of 100 bytes flat.
Yes, my comments are entirely based on my subjective personal observations, and obviously the numbers are just made up and likely very wrong, they're only there to make my general point. My subjective personal observations come both from the open source world (watching the interactions of various personalities and groups of thinkers on the mailiing lists and irc), as well as numerous other completely unrelated groups of hackers, which I probably couldn't even remember to list them all (some of the less obvious ones to the open source / unix hacker crowd so well-storied by Eric Raymond's works might be things like the early-mid 90's efnet #hack crowd and the hacker cons from that timeframe, or the x86 asm demo scene from the 386-486 days, those kinda things. Great hackers pop up in all kinds of wierd places). That and perhaps most importantly, that I know that I am a hacker, and that virtually everything he said in his article made clear and perfect sense to me. And again as he said in his article, I'll probably never know if I have the stuff to be a Great Hacker (statistics say fat chance), but I'll always know that I'm a hacker, and that I've known, recognized, and worked with Great Hackers in the past
At least I put my name on my babble. As noted above, the numbers are just to make a point and complete bullshit -- I thought that was obvious by my using clean neat little factors of ten. The rest is from personal experience.
I'm going to have to disagree. You're confusing "open source hackers in general" with "Great Hackers", which is what he was describing. The two terms are not interchangable. For every 1000 crappy programmers who were never meant to be, there's 100 decent programmers, and there's 10 open-sourcy hacker guys are pretty damn cool (they make up your sourceforce demographic), and there's 1 Great Hacker.
And yeah, these great hackers, oddly enough, tend to have a lot of overlap with those sysadmin-y perl-y type people.
I would suspect this would be the easiest way for windows users to circumvent DRM on audio files as well. It wouldn't take much effort at all for someone to write a virtual soundcard device driver for windows that allowed any digital music played into it to be recorded as a straight up wav or mp3 or whatever. Just don't call it a DRM circumvention tool, call it an audio development/debugging tool, people will figure out how to use it and post instructions on bypassing DRM with it elsewhere.
I don't if it's any indication of what they'll do for dual-core, but on Hyperthreading Xeon's, Oracle charged us RAC licensing fees per physical processor, even though most OS tools show twice as many virtual processors.
Yeah I actually I did hit that problem, and I chose to send the mime type in the http header as text/html just to make things work for me. It's a sad world out there when you try to stick to standards and make things work for everyone.
In response to the other responses above - it was an in-house network monitoring app that only unix guys were meant to use, and we can all fire up a mozilla variant. I hit the IE problem when the iwndows guys decided they wanted to use our monitoring tool. So initially, there was no impetus for being IE-compatible.
Authors of RSS feed-grabbing software should do the responsible thing: allow the user to set a desired refresh-rate down to as low as say 1 hour, but always use a random 30 minute window for the actual refresh time.
So, if the user specifies a two hour refresh time, and the application just got done pulling a feed, it should sleep for 105 minutes plus a random amount of time between 0 and 30 minutes, which means the feed is actually updated randomly in the window of 1:45-2:15 after the previous update.
At the very very least if they don't do the above, they should at least base their refreshes on time intervals since startup (or since the last pull), so that you don't see the global synchronizations on:00 as badly.
I use the "random 30 minute window" technique similarly at the office to distribute the load on an rsync server and it works wonderfully (all the machines in our whole environment wake up on a cronjob at a wee hour of the morning, each sleeps for a random 0-30 minutes time interval and then fires off its rsync request - the result is that rsync load is distributed evenly over a 30 minute period instead of the server getting pounded into the dust for 5 minutes straight.).
Exactly. I'm not a full-time web developer, so I don't even think on these issues too hard most of the time. Recently I had to write a little network-monitoring app. I coded the output in standards-compliant XHTML 1.1, standards-compliant CSS for styling stuff, and I used PNGs with transparent backgrounds for certain little icons. I only tested my app in Firefox (yeah, my mistake). Later someone who actually uses IE tried to use my little web app, and found gray background squares around all my supposedly transparent-backgrounded images. Sucked. Now I know what all you web developers already knew - I have to put a background color on these pngs which matches the background they're placed on that I specified in my stylesheet. How redundant and stupid.
They were working together, but they weren't conscious of it. My buddy and I working the late shift at the NSA mind-control console decided to flip the switch on three braindead slashdotters and use them to steal and post this guy's tinfoil hat joke. We'll log the activity as "systems function check" or something, not like anyone reads the logs anyways.
The link to the "small israeli company" is actually a link to TimeDomain, which is not the right guys. The second link (the news article) mentions that the company with the cool new toy we're discussing is Camero, and that there's another company TimeDomain which already had a product based on similar technology that was much more limited. The link is to TimeDomain, not to Camero.
I'm pretty sure I rode on the beginnings of this monorail last time I was in Vegas, which was like, almost a year ago. It was runnin gbetween that strip of places where the Luxor and Mandalay Bay and all thsoe are at, wherever that is in Vegas.
I was hoping they'd do this. I think (IIRC) the original GFS for linux was (or was intended to be?) open source, then Sistina changed their minds and made it proprietary and commercial. So then there was an OpenGFS project, which never got off the ground. Now RedHat bought Sistina and they're GPLing the code.
Yes, I think there is. A principle tenet of such a system is of course that the user should be able to control exactly which peices of information an organization is allowed to view, and the lifetime and scope of their rights to said information. You can wrap this up into standardized profiles too (Profile A is a fake name and my hotmail address and you don't care what they do with it, to give to random free registrations, Profile B gives real name and a good email, but not too much personal detail, Profile C gives everything up but says they can't give it to any other company under any circumstance, and must destroy their records of the information within 1 month, etc..), A company wants your info, you select the profile to feed them based on your level of trust).
Those kinds of things are mostly a matter of policy and law, and aren't even that interesting. What's interesting is a good technnological basis for the sharing, authentication, centralization, and de-centralization of this data, using advanced cryptographic techniques, translucent databases, and even wierd style of P2P data storage, which is spinning in my head.
At 29.99/mo, you're paying vonage a salary of roughly $360 / year.
Assuming you (on average) spend an hour a month dicking around with your VoIP setup that you wouldn'thave ahd to if you have used vonage, then if you make less than $30/hr at your job it's worth your time, and if you make more than $30/hr, you should just buy vonage.
You spend about half your waking life in an office, and therefore you shoudl expect some level of privacy and a decent standard of living. The biggest infraction against this that many modern offices make is the "cube farm".
Cubicles are a great economical alternative to traditional offices, but you must give people ample room to breath, and ample privacy. 2 foot by 4 foot cubes with waist/desk-high walls is BAD. 6-8 feet on a side and walls that are neck to head high on the average employee is GOOD.
Additionally, it helps to provide ample privacy rooms. These are small conference rooms (actual rooms with doors and (possibly translucent glass) walls. They don't get booked for meetings, they're designed for impromptu use. When someone needs to make a telephone call that's personal in nature, or a couple people can see their discussion is getting a bit heated for cubeland and needs to be hashed out in private, or small impromptu team meetings, etc. This keeps distracting drama-rama out of the cube area, keeps people's privacy better protected, and prevents the distracting small team meetings in the cube-hallways that annoy everyone nearby trying to work.
Good quality white-noise generators help a little bit on the privacy and distraction fronts as well. Just enough to drown the distant din, but don't turn them up so loud that people can't willfully talk to the guy in the next cube over.
Lighting. Your employees use computer monitors. This means you don't want the outdoor light coming in through windows causing glare on their monitors, and you don't want nasty flourescent lights wreaking havoc in the eyestrain dept (hint: flashing light + flashing computer image = fried eyes). There are flourescents out there that are better than average for this, but the ultimate is anything that doesn't have a flashing frequency like flourescents do.
Hmm this comment is getting long, I'll be back later.
None the less, you are being presented with a choice in which the primary deciding factor is whether you'd rather give up 29.99/mo or give up your time and energy to get something else working and keep it working. If you are to make a rational decision on the matter, you must be capable of equating your time and energies to a monetary amount. Or you can just be an irrational dickhead idealogue.
I second Vonage. Vonage is one of the big reasons why so many DSL providers won't unbundle their DSL service from their local phone service. I'd much rather give Vonage $30/month for a pretty incredible VoIP solution over my DSL than buy Bell's gimpy bundled voice line that I'm forced into.
DNs is really, really, not designed for these types of payloads. You'd be far better off using a heirarchy of squid web caches than the DNS system for mass distribution of media.
A little off-topic here, but wasn't there once upon a time a software package that would emulate a modem in software using the mic/ear jacks on a soundcard? I'm thinking it only did some crappy low speed like 2400 or something, but my memory of this thing is real hazy. Perhaps with modern high end soundcards that are doing higher sample/bit rates, would it be possible to write a soft 56k modem using a soundcard?
Yeah, but their concept and framework appears to basically suck. They made a simple user database, tagged in some email address verification and a (currently gimped) "Read this image test", and release an API for any other website to authenticate against this database. Welcome to Web Programming 101. If the problem was this easy to fix, it would've been fixed a long time ago.
There is a (more than one probably) right way to do this, and this isn't even close to being it.
As a matter of fact, I came up with one while typing this, but I deleted my description of it. Why feed slashdot my design work when I should just jot this down somewhere and go implement it myself:)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was clever
Damn you beat me to it. Even in 2002, it was just a linux/elf rehash of what optimizating asm-geeks have been doing since the dawn of time. I distinctly remember a contest I had with another guy back around 1994 on 486-class machines running MSDOS, to see which of us could write a functional text pager (ala "more", press spacebar to see the next screen of text from standard input) in the fewest bytes possible in the resulting
1 m/s * 86400 seconds in a day = 86.4km. I don't think the battery is the problem, it's the pressures past 5k.
is there any way you can confine your wierdness to k5?
Yes, my comments are entirely based on my subjective personal observations, and obviously the numbers are just made up and likely very wrong, they're only there to make my general point. My subjective personal observations come both from the open source world (watching the interactions of various personalities and groups of thinkers on the mailiing lists and irc), as well as numerous other completely unrelated groups of hackers, which I probably couldn't even remember to list them all (some of the less obvious ones to the open source / unix hacker crowd so well-storied by Eric Raymond's works might be things like the early-mid 90's efnet #hack crowd and the hacker cons from that timeframe, or the x86 asm demo scene from the 386-486 days, those kinda things. Great hackers pop up in all kinds of wierd places). That and perhaps most importantly, that I know that I am a hacker, and that virtually everything he said in his article made clear and perfect sense to me. And again as he said in his article, I'll probably never know if I have the stuff to be a Great Hacker (statistics say fat chance), but I'll always know that I'm a hacker, and that I've known, recognized, and worked with Great Hackers in the past
At least I put my name on my babble. As noted above, the numbers are just to make a point and complete bullshit -- I thought that was obvious by my using clean neat little factors of ten. The rest is from personal experience.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/
I'm going to have to disagree. You're confusing "open source hackers in general" with "Great Hackers", which is what he was describing. The two terms are not interchangable. For every 1000 crappy programmers who were never meant to be, there's 100 decent programmers, and there's 10 open-sourcy hacker guys are pretty damn cool (they make up your sourceforce demographic), and there's 1 Great Hacker.
And yeah, these great hackers, oddly enough, tend to have a lot of overlap with those sysadmin-y perl-y type people.
I would suspect this would be the easiest way for windows users to circumvent DRM on audio files as well. It wouldn't take much effort at all for someone to write a virtual soundcard device driver for windows that allowed any digital music played into it to be recorded as a straight up wav or mp3 or whatever. Just don't call it a DRM circumvention tool, call it an audio development/debugging tool, people will figure out how to use it and post instructions on bypassing DRM with it elsewhere.
I don't if it's any indication of what they'll do for dual-core, but on Hyperthreading Xeon's, Oracle charged us RAC licensing fees per physical processor, even though most OS tools show twice as many virtual processors.
Yeah I actually I did hit that problem, and I chose to send the mime type in the http header as text/html just to make things work for me. It's a sad world out there when you try to stick to standards and make things work for everyone.
In response to the other responses above - it was an in-house network monitoring app that only unix guys were meant to use, and we can all fire up a mozilla variant. I hit the IE problem when the iwndows guys decided they wanted to use our monitoring tool. So initially, there was no impetus for being IE-compatible.
Authors of RSS feed-grabbing software should do the responsible thing: allow the user to set a desired refresh-rate down to as low as say 1 hour, but always use a random 30 minute window for the actual refresh time.
So, if the user specifies a two hour refresh time, and the application just got done pulling a feed, it should sleep for 105 minutes plus a random amount of time between 0 and 30 minutes, which means the feed is actually updated randomly in the window of 1:45-2:15 after the previous update.
At the very very least if they don't do the above, they should at least base their refreshes on time intervals since startup (or since the last pull), so that you don't see the global synchronizations on
I use the "random 30 minute window" technique similarly at the office to distribute the load on an rsync server and it works wonderfully (all the machines in our whole environment wake up on a cronjob at a wee hour of the morning, each sleeps for a random 0-30 minutes time interval and then fires off its rsync request - the result is that rsync load is distributed evenly over a 30 minute period instead of the server getting pounded into the dust for 5 minutes straight.).
Exactly. I'm not a full-time web developer, so I don't even think on these issues too hard most of the time. Recently I had to write a little network-monitoring app. I coded the output in standards-compliant XHTML 1.1, standards-compliant CSS for styling stuff, and I used PNGs with transparent backgrounds for certain little icons. I only tested my app in Firefox (yeah, my mistake). Later someone who actually uses IE tried to use my little web app, and found gray background squares around all my supposedly transparent-backgrounded images. Sucked. Now I know what all you web developers already knew - I have to put a background color on these pngs which matches the background they're placed on that I specified in my stylesheet. How redundant and stupid.
They were working together, but they weren't conscious of it. My buddy and I working the late shift at the NSA mind-control console decided to flip the switch on three braindead slashdotters and use them to steal and post this guy's tinfoil hat joke. We'll log the activity as "systems function check" or something, not like anyone reads the logs anyways.
The link to the "small israeli company" is actually a link to TimeDomain, which is not the right guys. The second link (the news article) mentions that the company with the cool new toy we're discussing is Camero, and that there's another company TimeDomain which already had a product based on similar technology that was much more limited. The link is to TimeDomain, not to Camero.
I'm pretty sure I rode on the beginnings of this monorail last time I was in Vegas, which was like, almost a year ago. It was runnin gbetween that strip of places where the Luxor and Mandalay Bay and all thsoe are at, wherever that is in Vegas.
I was hoping they'd do this. I think (IIRC) the original GFS for linux was (or was intended to be?) open source, then Sistina changed their minds and made it proprietary and commercial. So then there was an OpenGFS project, which never got off the ground. Now RedHat bought Sistina and they're GPLing the code.
Yes, I think there is. A principle tenet of such a system is of course that the user should be able to control exactly which peices of information an organization is allowed to view, and the lifetime and scope of their rights to said information. You can wrap this up into standardized profiles too (Profile A is a fake name and my hotmail address and you don't care what they do with it, to give to random free registrations, Profile B gives real name and a good email, but not too much personal detail, Profile C gives everything up but says they can't give it to any other company under any circumstance, and must destroy their records of the information within 1 month, etc..), A company wants your info, you select the profile to feed them based on your level of trust).
Those kinds of things are mostly a matter of policy and law, and aren't even that interesting. What's interesting is a good technnological basis for the sharing, authentication, centralization, and de-centralization of this data, using advanced cryptographic techniques, translucent databases, and even wierd style of P2P data storage, which is spinning in my head.
At 29.99/mo, you're paying vonage a salary of roughly $360 / year.
Assuming you (on average) spend an hour a month dicking around with your VoIP setup that you wouldn'thave ahd to if you have used vonage, then if you make less than $30/hr at your job it's worth your time, and if you make more than $30/hr, you should just buy vonage.
But let's just cover a couple big ones:
You spend about half your waking life in an office, and therefore you shoudl expect some level of privacy and a decent standard of living. The biggest infraction against this that many modern offices make is the "cube farm".
Cubicles are a great economical alternative to traditional offices, but you must give people ample room to breath, and ample privacy. 2 foot by 4 foot cubes with waist/desk-high walls is BAD. 6-8 feet on a side and walls that are neck to head high on the average employee is GOOD.
Additionally, it helps to provide ample privacy rooms. These are small conference rooms (actual rooms with doors and (possibly translucent glass) walls. They don't get booked for meetings, they're designed for impromptu use. When someone needs to make a telephone call that's personal in nature, or a couple people can see their discussion is getting a bit heated for cubeland and needs to be hashed out in private, or small impromptu team meetings, etc. This keeps distracting drama-rama out of the cube area, keeps people's privacy better protected, and prevents the distracting small team meetings in the cube-hallways that annoy everyone nearby trying to work.
Good quality white-noise generators help a little bit on the privacy and distraction fronts as well. Just enough to drown the distant din, but don't turn them up so loud that people can't willfully talk to the guy in the next cube over.
Lighting. Your employees use computer monitors. This means you don't want the outdoor light coming in through windows causing glare on their monitors, and you don't want nasty flourescent lights wreaking havoc in the eyestrain dept (hint: flashing light + flashing computer image = fried eyes). There are flourescents out there that are better than average for this, but the ultimate is anything that doesn't have a flashing frequency like flourescents do.
Hmm this comment is getting long, I'll be back later.
None the less, you are being presented with a choice in which the primary deciding factor is whether you'd rather give up 29.99/mo or give up your time and energy to get something else working and keep it working. If you are to make a rational decision on the matter, you must be capable of equating your time and energies to a monetary amount. Or you can just be an irrational dickhead idealogue.
I second Vonage. Vonage is one of the big reasons why so many DSL providers won't unbundle their DSL service from their local phone service. I'd much rather give Vonage $30/month for a pretty incredible VoIP solution over my DSL than buy Bell's gimpy bundled voice line that I'm forced into.
DNs is really, really, not designed for these types of payloads. You'd be far better off using a heirarchy of squid web caches than the DNS system for mass distribution of media.
A little off-topic here, but wasn't there once upon a time a software package that would emulate a modem in software using the mic/ear jacks on a soundcard? I'm thinking it only did some crappy low speed like 2400 or something, but my memory of this thing is real hazy. Perhaps with modern high end soundcards that are doing higher sample/bit rates, would it be possible to write a soft 56k modem using a soundcard?
Yeah, but their concept and framework appears to basically suck. They made a simple user database, tagged in some email address verification and a (currently gimped) "Read this image test", and release an API for any other website to authenticate against this database. Welcome to Web Programming 101. If the problem was this easy to fix, it would've been fixed a long time ago.
There is a (more than one probably) right way to do this, and this isn't even close to being it.
As a matter of fact, I came up with one while typing this, but I deleted my description of it. Why feed slashdot my design work when I should just jot this down somewhere and go implement it myself