If I wanted to hide something in the linux code for random number generation, and it was obfuscated, not well discussed, not well documented, deliberately made hard to understand, etc., how long would it take before someone actually managed to decipher the whole thing, and realize that the whole kernel random number generator was bleep and needed to be replaced?
It has already happened. The linux kernel RNG was crud, and I really hope it has been replaced by now.
Hiding something in open source? Not impossible. The real question is: What is the backlash when it finally comes out in the public?
That's not a question, it's not like we get to actually choose who to vote for. It's like you coming over to my house for dinner and I offer you your choice of tripe or haggis. Which is the better choice?
What *was* wrong with backup exec? Why did I stop using it?
Well, first, I'm not sure that I have stopped using it. NtBackup, as seen in XP, looks frightfully like it. Fortunately (unfortunately?), it has not managed to make a good backup in years.
I currently use rsync with a bunch of args (including fake-super on the destination, and one to fake attributes in extended args) to an HFS, and then Time Machine that HFS.
Backup Exec had a bunch of problems. The two that I remember where: 1. Demonstrated failure to restore short names properly. This wasn't trivial or theoretical -- this *BIT* me, hard. 2. Absolutely no email support worth anything. Complaints may as well have gone to/dev/null. Not even a form letter acknowledging the submission, followed by a second form letter saying "The devs have looked into your issue and will address it in a future release." 3. The backup exec that I was using came with my cartridge tape drive system. It was a "free" edition, meaning that it was included in the price -- oh yea, back then it was seagate backup exec, and it was a seagate tape drive. One of those semi-random access (some seek time, but with 40 or 50 tracks, much less than the full backup size) streaming tapes.
4. No support for saving data except into single files, or multiple tapes. Once the tape drive was retired, could I use this to save to multiple DVD's? Nope. Incrementals were fine -- they'd fit on a single DVD. But the initial backup? Bleep.
Rsync and Time Machine probably lose the short file names. The truth is, I haven't seen a single backup program that claims to keep those. Heck, I haven't seen a backup program that claims to track hard links (need to check Time Machine... how does it's heavy use of hard links affect user hard links?)
"I'm about to embark on developing active content (database driven, and web services) for the first time for my website and I have grown to love PHP. Knowing that there are other web development platforms available, and noticing some disdain for PHP in some circles, I'm curious to know which platforms slashdotters prefer along with the reasons why. Before I get started into heavy development I would like to get some opinions and more facts. Why shouldn't I use PHP?"
So lets actually look at the question:
1. Developer has grown to love PHP. 2. Developer is adding active content for the first time. 3. Developer wants to get "the one right truth" before heavy development.
Conclusion: Developer has forgotten the very basic rule of coding: You will throw it away and recode it.
Repeat: You will throw it away and recode it.
If you ever forget that, you do not know how to code.
How do you write the best, high quality code? Answer: You understand the problem. How do you understand a problem? Answer: You write something that looked good initially, failed, and then understood why it failed.
My recommendation: Write a proof of concept -- a small scale demo, something a little more than a mock-up.
Learn from that, and then write the next version. This second version is first written in "english", or "file cards (*)", or "text files". Then it is re-written in some programming language.
This version is the first real version (you just thew away version zero). This is the version that you expect to work. And, in the process, you'll understand exactly what you are trying to do.
The process is no different for a desktop program, an HTML-output report generator, or an HTML/Javascript (with or without async)/CSS/Dom manipulation input and output program.
The goals of programming, of a functioning program, are something along these lines:
1. Work correctly. 2. Work as expected. 3. Work securely. 4. Work fast enough.
(you may switch the order of the last three.)
Ideally, you want:
5. Work quickly. 6. Work with few resources consumed.
Programmer time is a resource. Maintenance time is a resource. Disk space and CPU time are also resources.
Security may be a pain, or impossible, in languages like PHP. Even if your code is 100% perfect, if you are using frameworks, you may have pain. Remember: We just had recent disclosure that most web development systems used some type of hash on the input data as part of their function, said input data was 100% under attacker control, and attackers could do major hash table collision attacks with very little resources consumed, and no way for the developer to counter it.
You love PHP? Fine. Use that for your first trial. Don't fall in love with your first trial.
*: Programming by file cards: This is a way to identify your classes and objects / primary data structures and operations. Get a bunch of file cards -- either 3x5 or 4x6, primarily based on how small you can still write legibly. On each card, you identify one data structure or class, and the primary operations you think you want to perform. If those operations require the use of other data structures/classes, you identify what you want to do with/to those structures.
If a class's requirements -- including what other people want to do to it -- gets too big for your file card, break it up into parts.
John Nash showed that economics can be modeled mathematically, that it follows certain rules, that the implementation of the economy doesn't alter those rules... And anything that is repeatable, deterministic and experimental in the physical world is a science.
And that is why it is a science.
Different take: Since the translations between reality and math destroy the assumptions, the conclusions that come out are completely unjustified.
For example, Micro economics has the assumption of perfect information. The translation into math basically treats information as another good, and you pay more for better information.
Never mind that this introduces a feedback term, which eliminates the solvability, and introduces chaotic behavior. It also assumes that the information is available to purchase at all; given that the current economic collapse is based on lack of information and outright lying/hiding/disguising information, that shows another problem.
Oh, and your Turing issues have another flaw. You assume that no computer can ever be made that is not within the Turing domain. That's a big assumption. Turing machines were all about showing what is common to all (then) current systems; it isn't clear that nothing can ever be made outside of that limit.
I'm curious, now, as it strikes me reading your comment, what other world object exists out there that defines its own purpose to you?... What you have on your lap isn't telling you what to do with it.
I beg to differ. The cat in my lap tells me that I'm supposed to pet it and type one handed. It is defining its own purpose
Job security: Look at some of the stuff on DailyWTF.com.
Imagine code that is doing license checks that just assumes that if it's 2012, then the license is invalid.
Imagine code that has a bunch of delay loops in it -- for (long x=0; x1000000; x++) or the equivalent -- and if the coders can't do anything else that week, they speed up the program.
Proper comments? Next thing you'll be saying, it's not enough to reverse engineer what NTFS is doing, Microsoft should explain WHY A instead of B so that people can actually re-implement it properly instead of having to guess and getting complaints from chkdsk or a slower drive.
10.5: Major new features in the Objective C language; major new features in the kernel and application kit. Best of breed backup system as an automatic default, as easy to use as "hook a drive up, and click the "yes" button that pops up".
Costs? Yea, parts of the 1.4 iLife broke, and didn't tell you. Photoshop elements 2 broke, (and it wasn't clear at first that it was the OS change that did it). EOF started the descent into oblivion.
10.6? Kept 10.5 support in Rosetta. Bunch of new things that are actually good.
10.7? Significant security pluses (encrypted disks, encrypted Time Machine). Major improvements for autosaving applications, full screen apps, etc. Major minuses in lots and lots of other areas. Major changes to user interface. Major problems with batteries on laptop upgrades. Elimination of Rosetta. And most people advising that if you don't need the few new good features of 10.7 to go back to 10.6. Oddly, no one is saying go back to 10.5.
10.7 will be the mac vista. 10.8 will be better. But with a new UI and user experience, it will be the windows 7 of macintosh.
So, gee, 10.6 is the XP, 10.5 was the earlier working 2K, and 10.4 was... halfway between 98 and NT. 10.3 was 98, 10.2 was 95, and 10.1 was 3.11.
10.0 was just like 3 -- a shell on top of another system.:-)
And I've actually lived in places where at least twice a year people would bring some old, OLD cars in large numbers (30+), including, well, fine, not a T, but the successor (model A, I think?), still working, still running.
Plus, OMG, they really did make pink Cadillacs, that wasn't just a joke.
Kernel branches back to 2.0 (released in 1997) have maintainers who can update if required. The longest lived branch to date was the 2.4 branch (2001) , which last got a release Dec 2010.
Not to mention the folks doing uptime competition on the 1.somethings...
In a VM running under hardware-based virtualization (AMD-V / VT-x) , privileged code in the guest generally does run at privilege level 0, also referred to as (privileged), kernel mode, or ultimate privilege. This is required to implement a protected mode operating system; a modern guest OS needs to be able to implement its kernel mode, user mode, and have the hardware implement restrictions on its user processes, typically by reducing its user processes to RING 3, or RING1 / 2, which are permission levels the OS can configure to specify the allowed privileges. However, code in the VM is running as a guest OS.
Say what?
I admit to being many years out of the "state of the art" of virtualization, but the last time I checked, all VM's ran the guest at the lowest security level, and trapped all invalid instructions. These were then emulated by the VM hosts -- so, for instance, the guest would think it was running in privileged hardware mode, when it was really running in non-privileged mode, and the host software would play "lets pretend", and check what the virtual permission was (virtual unprivileged, in which case the trap would be propagated to the guest OS to terminate the mal-behaved guest process, or virtual privileged, in which case the VM software would fake the result.)
As a side effect, for example, while you could implement a TPM chip in software, it would have a different internal private key, and so would look like a different motherboard / different machine to the software. This was considered a good thing -- running the same software in multiple VM's would show as multiple different computers instead of multiple instances of the same computer.
But this does mean that a guest OS can implement its own privileges without needing raw access to the hardware privilege mechanism.
My bank has what I consider to be really good security.
My login page just asks for my account number. Then, the bank proves who it is to me -- by showing me a picture of my choosing and a passphrase of my choosing -- before it asks me for my password.
In other words, before it asks me to give a secret away, it verifies itself with a secret.
As if that weren't good enough, on any browser that I haven't registered, it gives me a challenge question. So, to fake this, even if the scammer managed to get my account name and password, it doesn't have the browser credential, and can't get past the security question; it can't pretend to be my bank because it doesn't know my picture and passphrase (only delivered over SSL), etc.
To clarify: I give my account number. If it is playing MITM, it gets a challenge question, which it can't answer and I know is invalid if it passes it to me; if it wants to bypass that and just ask for my password, it doesn't know what image/phrase to show; it can't play transparent MITM and watch because of SSL security and lack of browser private key credential. That's the best security I've seen so far. Just fails to keylogging software, but that's what a PPC mac is for:-).
I surf with Adblock and NoScript. I actually have google's text ads turned on.
My normal surfing is based on opening lots of tabs, and then going through them.
What happens with unrestricted behavior? Audio ads. Youtubes that default to "play on load". Cpu 100% from tabs that are in the background. Sites that hijack the "close" button. Etc.
I refuse to play that game anymore.
It is _MY_ computer. It is MY browser. It is MY time online.
My computer is not the property of the sites I visit when I visit them; they have no privilege to run code just because I visited their site. And no, putting a "By visiting this site you agree to these terms" line at the bottom does not work.
The only way I can make that happen? NoScript and Adblock.
The old NeXT display postscript system used a 72-gon to approximate a circle. A 72-gon has a circumference to diameter ratio that is rational with a fixed value; does any one know how to calculate that?
Technically a 1MP camera has a 1152*864 or 1280*800 resolution.
But even THAT isn't accurate -- it takes 4 of those to generate one full piece of information.
More accurately, in 4 pixels, red and blue are sampled once, and green is sampled twice. Then, you have 4 color values sampled, and 8 color values interpolated.
So that should be advertised as a "1 million quarter-pixel" camera.
And yes, there are separate designs that give full color information at each point.
That last one is re-implementing appkit (cocoa) in javascript, complete with Objective-J (an Objective-C inspired extension to Javascript), with all of this compiled down to plain, ordinary javascript that then has to run... slowly, sadly, without good browser support.
Faster rendering? Don't think "Just put the text up on screen". Think "Load the images; remap the colors by ICC 2 standard color conversions; automatically adjust size and anti-alias the images. Run arbitrary programs, because with Javascript we are now an asynchronous execution engine, not just a text formatter. Deal with tables that don't force precomputed sizes, but are nested arbitrarily deep that we have to resize based on user font size preferences."
Did I miss any other big CPU issues of the modern web?
Frankly, I'd put the "Target speed and power" at 1.42 GHz, G4, or about 1.8 GHz, single core. Yes, newer systems are bigger, badder, faster, but there's an awful lot around that speed out there.
> Review and document inline with your coding, and you'll find you'll never need a "Full Stop" review.
My best experiences with "code review" is working in a team of two programmers to one terminal. If you have to go over every decision with someone else, and there's always someone else familiar with every section of code, then that's great.
Double the programmer cost of development may seem high, but that's only something like 1/6th the total cost, and it lowers the bug fixing cost.
Hulu's plan to take over the world by rotting our brains is failing.
Every time I go there, to look for shows, there isn't anything current. Even when they have the series that I want, they don't have the most current episodes.
If I missed the most recent episode of a serial show, then I've got a hole in a story. Hulu would be a great place to patch that hole.
I'm not opposed to ads. There's someone that puts one ad per ad-slot; that's not a problem. I'm opposed to crappy, stupid, insulting ads -- that's what makes me reach for the fast-forward button on my DVR.
Lacking any legal way to catch what I've paid for and missed, I do the only thing left -- I go to link sites like alluc.tv. After all, I've paid for them. I pay my cable company. I have the legal right to time shift.. So it's not "illegal" -- it is legal, it is within "fair use" of "time shift".
But sadly, it is soo bleeping hard to find working links -- somehow, things like DMCA are laws that override rights of fair use/time shifting. Never understood that.
Slashdot Mirror
So, just as an example, ...
If I wanted to hide something in the linux code for random number generation, and it was obfuscated, not well discussed, not well documented, deliberately made hard to understand, etc., how long would it take before someone actually managed to decipher the whole thing, and realize that the whole kernel random number generator was bleep and needed to be replaced?
It has already happened. The linux kernel RNG was crud, and I really hope it has been replaced by now.
Hiding something in open source? Not impossible. The real question is: What is the backlash when it finally comes out in the public?
That's not a question, it's not like we get to actually choose who to vote for. It's like you coming over to my house for dinner and I offer you your choice of tripe or haggis. Which is the better choice?
Well, Scooby and Shaggy won't eat haggis, so ...
What *was* wrong with backup exec? Why did I stop using it?
Well, first, I'm not sure that I have stopped using it. NtBackup, as seen in XP, looks frightfully like it. Fortunately (unfortunately?), it has not managed to make a good backup in years.
I currently use rsync with a bunch of args (including fake-super on the destination, and one to fake attributes in extended args) to an HFS, and then Time Machine that HFS.
Backup Exec had a bunch of problems. The two that I remember where: /dev/null. Not even a form letter acknowledging the submission, followed by a second form letter saying "The devs have looked into your issue and will address it in a future release."
1. Demonstrated failure to restore short names properly. This wasn't trivial or theoretical -- this *BIT* me, hard.
2. Absolutely no email support worth anything. Complaints may as well have gone to
3. The backup exec that I was using came with my cartridge tape drive system. It was a "free" edition, meaning that it was included in the price -- oh yea, back then it was seagate backup exec, and it was a seagate tape drive. One of those semi-random access (some seek time, but with 40 or 50 tracks, much less than the full backup size) streaming tapes.
4. No support for saving data except into single files, or multiple tapes. Once the tape drive was retired, could I use this to save to multiple DVD's? Nope. Incrementals were fine -- they'd fit on a single DVD. But the initial backup? Bleep.
Rsync and Time Machine probably lose the short file names. ... how does it's heavy use of hard links affect user hard links?)
The truth is, I haven't seen a single backup program that claims to keep those.
Heck, I haven't seen a backup program that claims to track hard links (need to check Time Machine
Time Machine, Apple OS.
"I'm about to embark on developing active content (database driven, and web services) for the first time for my website and I have grown to love PHP. Knowing that there are other web development platforms available, and noticing some disdain for PHP in some circles, I'm curious to know which platforms slashdotters prefer along with the reasons why. Before I get started into heavy development I would like to get some opinions and more facts. Why shouldn't I use PHP?"
So lets actually look at the question:
1. Developer has grown to love PHP.
2. Developer is adding active content for the first time.
3. Developer wants to get "the one right truth" before heavy development.
Conclusion: Developer has forgotten the very basic rule of coding: You will throw it away and recode it.
Repeat: You will throw it away and recode it.
If you ever forget that, you do not know how to code.
How do you write the best, high quality code? Answer: You understand the problem. How do you understand a problem? Answer: You write something that looked good initially, failed, and then understood why it failed.
My recommendation: Write a proof of concept -- a small scale demo, something a little more than a mock-up.
Learn from that, and then write the next version. This second version is first written in "english", or "file cards (*)", or "text files". Then it is re-written in some programming language.
This version is the first real version (you just thew away version zero). This is the version that you expect to work. And, in the process, you'll understand exactly what you are trying to do.
The process is no different for a desktop program, an HTML-output report generator, or an HTML/Javascript (with or without async) /CSS/Dom manipulation input and output program.
The goals of programming, of a functioning program, are something along these lines:
1. Work correctly.
2. Work as expected.
3. Work securely.
4. Work fast enough.
(you may switch the order of the last three.)
Ideally, you want:
5. Work quickly.
6. Work with few resources consumed.
Programmer time is a resource. Maintenance time is a resource. Disk space and CPU time are also resources.
Security may be a pain, or impossible, in languages like PHP. Even if your code is 100% perfect, if you are using frameworks, you may have pain. Remember: We just had recent disclosure that most web development systems used some type of hash on the input data as part of their function, said input data was 100% under attacker control, and attackers could do major hash table collision attacks with very little resources consumed, and no way for the developer to counter it.
You love PHP? Fine. Use that for your first trial. Don't fall in love with your first trial.
*: Programming by file cards: This is a way to identify your classes and objects / primary data structures and operations. Get a bunch of file cards -- either 3x5 or 4x6, primarily based on how small you can still write legibly. On each card, you identify one data structure or class, and the primary operations you think you want to perform. If those operations require the use of other data structures/classes, you identify what you want to do with/to those structures.
If a class's requirements -- including what other people want to do to it -- gets too big for your file card, break it up into parts.
John Nash showed that economics can be modeled mathematically, that it follows certain rules, that the implementation of the economy doesn't alter those rules... And anything that is repeatable, deterministic and experimental in the physical world is a science.
And that is why it is a science.
Different take: Since the translations between reality and math destroy the assumptions, the conclusions that come out are completely unjustified.
For example, Micro economics has the assumption of perfect information. The translation into math basically treats information as another good, and you pay more for better information.
Never mind that this introduces a feedback term, which eliminates the solvability, and introduces chaotic behavior. It also assumes that the information is available to purchase at all; given that the current economic collapse is based on lack of information and outright lying/hiding/disguising information, that shows another problem.
Oh, and your Turing issues have another flaw. You assume that no computer can ever be made that is not within the Turing domain. That's a big assumption. Turing machines were all about showing what is common to all (then) current systems; it isn't clear that nothing can ever be made outside of that limit.
I'm curious, now, as it strikes me reading your comment, what other world object exists out there that defines its own purpose to you? ... What you have on your lap isn't telling you what to do with it.
I beg to differ. The cat in my lap tells me that I'm supposed to pet it and type one handed. It is defining its own purpose
Job security: Look at some of the stuff on DailyWTF.com.
Imagine code that is doing license checks that just assumes that if it's 2012, then the license is invalid.
Imagine code that has a bunch of delay loops in it -- for (long x=0; x1000000; x++) or the equivalent -- and if the coders can't do anything else that week, they speed up the program.
Proper comments? Next thing you'll be saying, it's not enough to reverse engineer what NTFS is doing, Microsoft should explain WHY A instead of B so that people can actually re-implement it properly instead of having to guess and getting complaints from chkdsk or a slower drive.
Alright, lets see what OsX gave with upgrades.
10.5: Major new features in the Objective C language; major new features in the kernel and application kit. Best of breed backup system as an automatic default, as easy to use as "hook a drive up, and click the "yes" button that pops up".
Costs? Yea, parts of the 1.4 iLife broke, and didn't tell you. Photoshop elements 2 broke, (and it wasn't clear at first that it was the OS change that did it). EOF started the descent into oblivion.
10.6? Kept 10.5 support in Rosetta. Bunch of new things that are actually good.
10.7? Significant security pluses (encrypted disks, encrypted Time Machine). Major improvements for autosaving applications, full screen apps, etc. Major minuses in lots and lots of other areas. Major changes to user interface. Major problems with batteries on laptop upgrades. Elimination of Rosetta. And most people advising that if you don't need the few new good features of 10.7 to go back to 10.6. Oddly, no one is saying go back to 10.5.
10.7 will be the mac vista. 10.8 will be better. But with a new UI and user experience, it will be the windows 7 of macintosh.
So, gee, 10.6 is the XP, 10.5 was the earlier working 2K, and 10.4 was ... halfway between 98 and NT. 10.3 was 98, 10.2 was 95, and 10.1 was 3.11.
10.0 was just like 3 -- a shell on top of another system. :-)
And I've actually lived in places where at least twice a year people would bring some old, OLD cars in large numbers (30+), including, well, fine, not a T, but the successor (model A, I think?), still working, still running.
Plus, OMG, they really did make pink Cadillacs, that wasn't just a joke.
Kernel branches back to 2.0 (released in 1997) have maintainers who can update if required. The longest lived branch to date was the 2.4 branch (2001) , which last got a release Dec 2010.
Not to mention the folks doing uptime competition on the 1.somethings ...
In a VM running under hardware-based virtualization (AMD-V / VT-x) ,
privileged code in the guest generally does run at privilege level 0, also referred to as (privileged), kernel mode, or ultimate privilege. This is required to implement a protected mode operating system; a modern guest OS needs to be able to implement its kernel mode, user mode, and have the hardware implement restrictions on its user processes, typically by reducing its user processes to RING 3, or RING1 / 2, which are permission levels the OS can configure to specify the allowed privileges. However, code in the VM is running as a guest OS.
Say what?
I admit to being many years out of the "state of the art" of virtualization, but the last time I checked, all VM's ran the guest at the lowest security level, and trapped all invalid instructions. These were then emulated by the VM hosts -- so, for instance, the guest would think it was running in privileged hardware mode, when it was really running in non-privileged mode, and the host software would play "lets pretend", and check what the virtual permission was (virtual unprivileged, in which case the trap would be propagated to the guest OS to terminate the mal-behaved guest process, or virtual privileged, in which case the VM software would fake the result.)
As a side effect, for example, while you could implement a TPM chip in software, it would have a different internal private key, and so would look like a different motherboard / different machine to the software. This was considered a good thing -- running the same software in multiple VM's would show as multiple different computers instead of multiple instances of the same computer.
But this does mean that a guest OS can implement its own privileges without needing raw access to the hardware privilege mechanism.
My bank has what I consider to be really good security.
My login page just asks for my account number.
Then, the bank proves who it is to me -- by showing me a picture of my choosing and a passphrase of my choosing -- before it asks me for my password.
In other words, before it asks me to give a secret away, it verifies itself with a secret.
As if that weren't good enough, on any browser that I haven't registered, it gives me a challenge question. So, to fake this, even if the scammer managed to get my account name and password, it doesn't have the browser credential, and can't get past the security question; it can't pretend to be my bank because it doesn't know my picture and passphrase (only delivered over SSL), etc.
To clarify: I give my account number. If it is playing MITM, it gets a challenge question, which it can't answer and I know is invalid if it passes it to me; if it wants to bypass that and just ask for my password, it doesn't know what image/phrase to show; it can't play transparent MITM and watch because of SSL security and lack of browser private key credential. That's the best security I've seen so far. Just fails to keylogging software, but that's what a PPC mac is for :-).
What about the nudes by the old masters?
Apparently, you can't put a red hat and white beard on them, as then children (think of the children!) get confused about Santa.
Is there any chance of any (even unofficial) PPC release?
Not everyone has a new intel mac.
But by that time, it's too late.
I surf with Adblock and NoScript.
I actually have google's text ads turned on.
My normal surfing is based on opening lots of tabs, and then going through them.
What happens with unrestricted behavior?
Audio ads. Youtubes that default to "play on load". Cpu 100% from tabs that are in the background. Sites that hijack the "close" button. Etc.
I refuse to play that game anymore.
It is _MY_ computer.
It is MY browser.
It is MY time online.
My computer is not the property of the sites I visit when I visit them; they have no privilege to run code just because I visited their site. And no, putting a "By visiting this site you agree to these terms" line at the bottom does not work.
The only way I can make that happen? NoScript and Adblock.
You can watch other people play nethack. That is ... (I am at a loss for the right word)
Interesting. Intriguing. Nifty. And strange.
How does the Apple Graphics system draw a circle?
The old NeXT display postscript system used a 72-gon to approximate a circle. A 72-gon has a circumference to diameter ratio that is rational with a fixed value; does any one know how to calculate that?
Technically a 1MP camera has a 1152*864 or 1280*800 resolution.
But even THAT isn't accurate -- it takes 4 of those to generate one full piece of information.
More accurately, in 4 pixels, red and blue are sampled once, and green is sampled twice. Then, you have 4 color values sampled, and 8 color values interpolated.
So that should be advertised as a "1 million quarter-pixel" camera.
And yes, there are separate designs that give full color information at each point.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
What is a "Kibibyte"?
Well, I think a kibibit is what I feed puppies. Or was that kibblebit.
Alright, consider Javascript. Consider Google docs, spreadsheets, gmail.
... slowly, sadly, without good browser support.
Heck, consider http://280slides.com/
That last one is re-implementing appkit (cocoa) in javascript, complete with Objective-J (an Objective-C inspired extension to Javascript), with all of this compiled down to plain, ordinary javascript that then has to run
Faster rendering? Don't think "Just put the text up on screen". Think "Load the images; remap the colors by ICC 2 standard color conversions; automatically adjust size and anti-alias the images. Run arbitrary programs, because with Javascript we are now an asynchronous execution engine, not just a text formatter. Deal with tables that don't force precomputed sizes, but are nested arbitrarily deep that we have to resize based on user font size preferences."
Did I miss any other big CPU issues of the modern web?
Frankly, I'd put the "Target speed and power" at 1.42 GHz, G4, or about 1.8 GHz, single core. Yes, newer systems are bigger, badder, faster, but there's an awful lot around that speed out there.
So you compressed it, and since every compression algorithm has to have some bad case that expands and gets bigger ...
> Review and document inline with your coding, and you'll find you'll never need a "Full Stop" review.
My best experiences with "code review" is working in a team of two programmers to one terminal. If you have to go over every decision with someone else, and there's always someone else familiar with every section of code, then that's great.
Double the programmer cost of development may seem high, but that's only something like 1/6th the total cost, and it lowers the bug fixing cost.
Hulu's plan to take over the world by rotting our brains is failing.
Every time I go there, to look for shows, there isn't anything current. Even when they have the series that I want, they don't have the most current episodes.
If I missed the most recent episode of a serial show, then I've got a hole in a story. Hulu would be a great place to patch that hole.
I'm not opposed to ads. There's someone that puts one ad per ad-slot; that's not a problem. I'm opposed to crappy, stupid, insulting ads -- that's what makes me reach for the fast-forward button on my DVR.
Lacking any legal way to catch what I've paid for and missed, I do the only thing left -- I go to link sites like alluc.tv. After all, I've paid for them. I pay my cable company. I have the legal right to time shift.. So it's not "illegal" -- it is legal, it is within "fair use" of "time shift".
But sadly, it is soo bleeping hard to find working links -- somehow, things like DMCA are laws that override rights of fair use/time shifting. Never understood that.
Ahh. Thank you.