The short story: the levels of complexity we see in life around us are well beyond impossible. Stuart wants to invoke a mystery principle to explain this, but doesn't want it to be God.
I don't know why he wants any "mystery principle" for this, because there's a well known one called the anthropic principle that explains it perfectly adequately, as long as you understand a little probability theory.
I would expect its headless so that the purchaser can choose for themselves whether they want CRT or LCD. Or to reuse an existing CRT from the machine they're upgrading away from (which is what I do with about 50% of my upgrades).
Yes, but if the rumours are wrong, they can damage how any real products might be perceived.
Okay, I'll invent the next iPod rumour - it's going to have full video capability, an 18 hour battery life and the top model will have a 220GB hard disk. You can connect up a digital camcorder to its Firewire port, or a camera to its USB port, and use it to store all your photos and video, for syncing into the next-generation iLife suite.
You see the problem here, though? Because that rumour isn't accurate, it is obvious that you haven't broken any NDAs by spreading it. Therefore Apple _cannot_ sue you over it.
In order for them to consider taking action over an NDA breach, the information must be accurate. Otherwise it isn't an NDA breach.
Unless Apple has been spreading disinformation under NDA. Which would be a wierd thing to do.
Haha, what if the ghostscript driver it chooses for you isn't quite the right one?
What if the printer driver that WinXP chooses for you isn't quite the right one? Both problems are about as hard to solve, and roughly as common (i.e. they only happen if you have a very unusual model of printer).
What if only the second printer port is free on the back of your computer?
Huh? It's been a _long_ time since I saw a computer with two printer ports, and most people who aren't power users only have one printer. Besides, just about everyone's using USB these days.
You're bringing up problems here that only power users will see.
Fast forward to today and i dont see a "Your PHP" or "Your Python" kind of weekly magazine. Dr Dobbs magazine comes close, but that's really seriously high level.
YS it ain't, but I'm quite fond of Linux Format. There are often articles that take you through some simple programming excercise, e.g. building a web page with PHP and MySQL or something like that.
Took me an hour to figure out that I just have to type in the program's name!
An hour?! I had to go to the library to get a BOOK to figure it out. Ah, those were the days. Spending hours in the C:\WINDOWS directory, trying to work out which of those.EXE files you used to start windows, just to realise it was the single.COM one.
How can the parent post be modded anything above "-1 Troll" when its.sig is not only blatant spam, but is blatant spam revealing either the stupidity or the venality of the poster?
Because people are moderating the post, not the signature? Many of us have signatures switched off, you know.
I tried a comparison a few weeks back, just before suprnova.org was closed down.
I tried to download the same set of files (a collection of 6 episodes of a popular TV series) over two different connections, one using bittorrent (azureus, using a tracker found on suprnova), one using emule.
The total size of the files to download was 2.1Gb. Both machines had 576/128kbit ADSL connections.
The Azureus download completed after 2 days, an average of 12 Kbytes per second. The total upload volume was approximately the same as download. Over the same period, the eMule download had got less than half the data, an average of just under 6 Kbytes per second. It had uploaded over 3 times as much data as it had downloaded.
Not 100% scientific, but I've seen this kind of result a lot. My conclusion: the ed2k network is full of leeches who download but never upload. Bittorrent probably has a few, but nowhere near as many.
Given how Freenet works, this would be (almost) impossible to prove.
No it isn't. All they have to do is find the file they're interested in, download it, and track the IPs that it comes from. Bang. There's the proof. OK, so those IP addresses aren't the original uploaders of the content, but they did proxy it.
And due to the anonymous nature of the network, you can be charged with it about as much as US Postal could if you put child pornography in a sealed envelope.
That's a more interesting argument, but I wouldn't want to be the test case. I can't afford that kind of legal fee.
Of course, she takes the piss out of me because I look at every receipt to check the print quality, but that's because I do tech support for most of the UK's supermarkets...
So is it you that I blame for the fact that all my 2 year old Safeway receipts are now illegible?;)
In the UK, at least, Simon Singh's book on Fermat's last theorem was very successful, so they can be interested.
Not to mention, of course, his Code Book (assuming you consider cryptography as a branch of mathematics, which I think most people do).
Re:If you are interested in solving math puzzles
on
Prime Obsession
·
· Score: 2
You might check out my current MD5hash Challenge. Some people have told me that it is impossible to solve, some have said that mathematically it is solveable.
They're both right. It might be possible to solve, but will certainly require some developments in cryptography that have yet to be made.
Failing that, a brute force search of all 128 bit inputs would do the job. I wouldn't expect it to finish quickly though.
All in all, I'd wager that your money's safe for at least the next ten years.
Still eagerly awaiting sequences that aren't attached to a table.
Maybe I'm just being daft, but I don't see what use that actually is? I know you can do it with Informix, which I've been doing some work with lately, so I'm sure there must be _some_ purpose, but I can't figure it out.
Excuse me? This is _not_ a troll. It's a warning. Don't assume because you're only browsing legit sites that you can't get trojans installed. Sites with admins who don't install patches quickly enough are all that you need to be browsing for that.
I have a Celery 500 with 256 win 98 and on board graphics and I can play any format i have ever downloaded fine and watch full movies in Divx and XVID without crashing in the new WMP. so what the hell are you talking about?
My similar machine sometimes has trouble with DVD resolution MPEG-2s. What codecs are you using?
Technically, Jet is the database. But no one ever calls it that, they call them Access dabases. Here's the coordinates to the next meeting of the International League of Pedants.
There's a very important reason for realising that they're two separate components. That is that Jet is _not_ packaged as part of Access, it's installed along with Windows. This means that any Windows software can use an "Access" database (if you insist on calling them that), whether or not you actually have Access installed.
Actually, Access is two things, neither of which is the same as, for example, MySQL. The first is a user-friendly front end to a database. The second is a program to manipulate data files, which, unlike in most SQL databases, are self-contained and can be transferred to other people without any particular hassle.
Actually, most people seem not to have noticed that Access is only the first of these. The second is called "Jet", which is a component of Windows, not MS Office. Look in your windows\system32 directory. Even if you've never installed Access, you should have "msjet40.dll", which is the database storage engine used by Access.
You're confusing "works" with "always works." Microsoft's major advantage is that, at least at first, the interface is fairly intuitive for basic tasks, the software install process is idiot proof, and the applications "just work"
Yeah, right. I spent two hours trying to fix an installation just yesterday. I think I can tell you that it didn't "just work". See, when I installed the OS on my computer, it turns out the date was wrong. While Windows 98 and the BIOS setup screen had both shown the year as 2004, when I upgraded to XP it read it as 16504, and dutifully stored this year away in the creation times of all the files that were installed with the OS, including the.NET framework. Obviously I noticed this pretty quickly and set the date to the correct year. However, I couldn't find any way of setting the creation times back.
When I came to try to run an ASP.NET application on the machine, the web server failed with an exception in the routine that converts file timestamps to.NET's internal format, complaining that it wasn't in the range of valid dates.
In the end I had to make new copies of all my files, and uninstall and reinstall several key Windows components, including the entire.NET framework, to make it work.
I wouldn't describe that as "applications just work".
1 - An installation standard that is every bit as idiot proof as installing a self executing binary with microsoft.
I run YaST, and click on "install / remove software", choose what I want to install, and then click on "Accept". Seems easy enough to me.
2 - An out of the box user interface that has the polished look and feel users have come to expect form Apple and MS.
I'm running KDE3. It seems adequately polished to me. In fact, I was recently doing some work on it when my manager came over and commented on how slick he felt the user interface of k3b was. He's usually firmly of the "windows is so much better than everything else that there's no competition" mindset.
3 - Application suites competitive with pay products like Office.
That one I'll almost buy. OpenOffice is good, but there are some limitations that I've found would prevent its adoption for some people. Particularly the row limit on spreadsheets, and lack of a few spreadsheet functions that I find particularly useful in Excel. I'd contribute them myself if I had time, but I don't. Nor do I have enough free disk space for an OO.o build environment, I suspect.
"XCP is in commercial use and is actively being used by four of the major Record Labels for Pre Release copy protection."
And you know why they aren't using it for released recordings? Cause they won't fit on a single disc any more, is why.
You can only store so much data on a CD. About 100 minutes is the most you can practically do while maintaining compatibility with the majority of players, I believe.
This scheme puts at least 3 copies of the music on the disc. One in their own (probably highly compressed) DRM-laden format, one in standard CDDA format and one in MPEG format for the VCD copy.
Now, problem is, both the CDDA format and the VCD format are very strict about the data rate you record at -- in fact, both of them mandate 176400 bits per second. Therefore, even assuming the DRM format takes up no space on the disc whatsoever, the most you're going to get on a CD in this format is 50 minutes, unless it's violating one of the two above-mentioned standards, probably VCD (as it is a compressed format designed for storing video and audio, and they don't need to store any video). But, it ain't going to work on a lot of DVD players if that's what they've done.
Why is this modded as redundant? I don't see any other posts saying the same thing, and it is an interesting point.
And I have to say, I have the same experience. I run Win2K with mozilla as my browser and e-mail client and have _never_ had trouble. And that's not through lack of checking for it, or for lack of doing things that are typically seen as "risky" activities.
Note that a few months back there was a worm going around that hacked IIS web servers and dropped a spyware installation crack into all the HTML files on the server. There are probably plenty of legit sites that unknowingly install spyware on IE users' computers these days.
Slashdot Mirror
The short story: the levels of complexity we see in life around us are well beyond impossible. Stuart wants to invoke a mystery principle to explain this, but doesn't want it to be God.
I don't know why he wants any "mystery principle" for this, because there's a well known one called the anthropic principle that explains it perfectly adequately, as long as you understand a little probability theory.
I would expect its headless so that the purchaser can choose for themselves whether they want CRT or LCD. Or to reuse an existing CRT from the machine they're upgrading away from (which is what I do with about 50% of my upgrades).
Yes, but if the rumours are wrong, they can damage how any real products might be perceived.
Okay, I'll invent the next iPod rumour - it's going to have full video capability, an 18 hour battery life and the top model will have a 220GB hard disk. You can connect up a digital camcorder to its Firewire port, or a camera to its USB port, and use it to store all your photos and video, for syncing into the next-generation iLife suite.
You see the problem here, though? Because that rumour isn't accurate, it is obvious that you haven't broken any NDAs by spreading it. Therefore Apple _cannot_ sue you over it.
In order for them to consider taking action over an NDA breach, the information must be accurate. Otherwise it isn't an NDA breach.
Unless Apple has been spreading disinformation under NDA. Which would be a wierd thing to do.
I tripped over an ethernet cable in the lab and Bang, SuSE got installed.
I've never had a SuSE installation as the result of a bang before, although I did "have a lot of fun".
Perhaps you forgot to terminate your network cable?
Haha, what if the ghostscript driver it chooses for you isn't quite the right one?
What if the printer driver that WinXP chooses for you isn't quite the right one? Both problems are about as hard to solve, and roughly as common (i.e. they only happen if you have a very unusual model of printer).
What if only the second printer port is free on the back of your computer?
Huh? It's been a _long_ time since I saw a computer with two printer ports, and most people who aren't power users only have one printer. Besides, just about everyone's using USB these days.
You're bringing up problems here that only power users will see.
Fast forward to today and i dont see a "Your PHP" or "Your Python" kind of weekly magazine. Dr Dobbs magazine comes close, but that's really seriously high level.
YS it ain't, but I'm quite fond of Linux Format. There are often articles that take you through some simple programming excercise, e.g. building a web page with PHP and MySQL or something like that.
Took me an hour to figure out that I just have to type in the program's name!
.EXE files you used to start windows, just to realise it was the single .COM one.
:)
An hour?! I had to go to the library to get a BOOK to figure it out. Ah, those were the days. Spending hours in the C:\WINDOWS directory, trying to work out which of those
"This program requires Microsoft Windows"
How can the parent post be modded anything above "-1 Troll" when its .sig is not only blatant spam, but is blatant spam revealing either the stupidity or the venality of the poster?
Because people are moderating the post, not the signature? Many of us have signatures switched off, you know.
I tried a comparison a few weeks back, just before suprnova.org was closed down.
I tried to download the same set of files (a collection of 6 episodes of a popular TV series) over two different connections, one using bittorrent (azureus, using a tracker found on suprnova), one using emule.
The total size of the files to download was 2.1Gb. Both machines had 576/128kbit ADSL connections.
The Azureus download completed after 2 days, an average of 12 Kbytes per second. The total upload volume was approximately the same as download. Over the same period, the eMule download had got less than half the data, an average of just under 6 Kbytes per second. It had uploaded over 3 times as much data as it had downloaded.
Not 100% scientific, but I've seen this kind of result a lot. My conclusion: the ed2k network is full of leeches who download but never upload. Bittorrent probably has a few, but nowhere near as many.
Given how Freenet works, this would be (almost) impossible to prove.
No it isn't. All they have to do is find the file they're interested in, download it, and track the IPs that it comes from. Bang. There's the proof. OK, so those IP addresses aren't the original uploaders of the content, but they did proxy it.
And due to the anonymous nature of the network, you can be charged with it about as much as US Postal could if you put child pornography in a sealed envelope.
That's a more interesting argument, but I wouldn't want to be the test case. I can't afford that kind of legal fee.
Of course, she takes the piss out of me because I look at every receipt to check the print quality, but that's because I do tech support for most of the UK's supermarkets...
;)
So is it you that I blame for the fact that all my 2 year old Safeway receipts are now illegible?
For the record: I hate thermal printers.
In the UK, at least, Simon Singh's book on Fermat's last theorem was very successful, so they can be interested.
Not to mention, of course, his Code Book (assuming you consider cryptography as a branch of mathematics, which I think most people do).
You might check out my current MD5hash Challenge. Some people have told me that it is impossible to solve, some have said that mathematically it is solveable.
They're both right. It might be possible to solve, but will certainly require some developments in cryptography that have yet to be made.
Failing that, a brute force search of all 128 bit inputs would do the job. I wouldn't expect it to finish quickly though.
All in all, I'd wager that your money's safe for at least the next ten years.
Still eagerly awaiting sequences that aren't attached to a table.
Maybe I'm just being daft, but I don't see what use that actually is? I know you can do it with Informix, which I've been doing some work with lately, so I'm sure there must be _some_ purpose, but I can't figure it out.
Excuse me? This is _not_ a troll. It's a warning. Don't assume because you're only browsing legit sites that you can't get trojans installed. Sites with admins who don't install patches quickly enough are all that you need to be browsing for that.
I have a Celery 500 with 256 win 98 and on board graphics and I can play any format i have ever downloaded fine and watch full movies in Divx and XVID without crashing in the new WMP. so what the hell are you talking about?
My similar machine sometimes has trouble with DVD resolution MPEG-2s. What codecs are you using?
Technically, Jet is the database. But no one ever calls it that, they call them Access dabases. Here's the coordinates to the next meeting of the International League of Pedants.
There's a very important reason for realising that they're two separate components. That is that Jet is _not_ packaged as part of Access, it's installed along with Windows. This means that any Windows software can use an "Access" database (if you insist on calling them that), whether or not you actually have Access installed.
That's not what I'd call "pedantic".
Actually, Access is two things, neither of which is the same as, for example, MySQL. The first is a user-friendly front end to a database. The second is a program to manipulate data files, which, unlike in most SQL databases, are self-contained and can be transferred to other people without any particular hassle.
Actually, most people seem not to have noticed that Access is only the first of these. The second is called "Jet", which is a component of Windows, not MS Office. Look in your windows\system32 directory. Even if you've never installed Access, you should have "msjet40.dll", which is the database storage engine used by Access.
The Last Question
:)
A brilliant story, and thank you for reminding me of it.
You're confusing "works" with "always works." Microsoft's major advantage is that, at least at first, the interface is fairly intuitive for basic tasks, the software install process is idiot proof, and the applications "just work"
.NET framework. Obviously I noticed this pretty quickly and set the date to the correct year. However, I couldn't find any way of setting the creation times back.
.NET's internal format, complaining that it wasn't in the range of valid dates.
.NET framework, to make it work.
Yeah, right. I spent two hours trying to fix an installation just yesterday. I think I can tell you that it didn't "just work". See, when I installed the OS on my computer, it turns out the date was wrong. While Windows 98 and the BIOS setup screen had both shown the year as 2004, when I upgraded to XP it read it as 16504, and dutifully stored this year away in the creation times of all the files that were installed with the OS, including the
When I came to try to run an ASP.NET application on the machine, the web server failed with an exception in the routine that converts file timestamps to
In the end I had to make new copies of all my files, and uninstall and reinstall several key Windows components, including the entire
I wouldn't describe that as "applications just work".
1 - An installation standard that is every bit as idiot proof as installing a self executing binary with microsoft.
I run YaST, and click on "install / remove software", choose what I want to install, and then click on "Accept". Seems easy enough to me.
2 - An out of the box user interface that has the polished look and feel users have come to expect form Apple and MS.
I'm running KDE3. It seems adequately polished to me. In fact, I was recently doing some work on it when my manager came over and commented on how slick he felt the user interface of k3b was. He's usually firmly of the "windows is so much better than everything else that there's no competition" mindset.
3 - Application suites competitive with pay products like Office.
That one I'll almost buy. OpenOffice is good, but there are some limitations that I've found would prevent its adoption for some people. Particularly the row limit on spreadsheets, and lack of a few spreadsheet functions that I find particularly useful in Excel. I'd contribute them myself if I had time, but I don't. Nor do I have enough free disk space for an OO.o build environment, I suspect.
"XCP is in commercial use and is actively being used by four of the major Record Labels for Pre Release copy protection."
And you know why they aren't using it for released recordings? Cause they won't fit on a single disc any more, is why.
You can only store so much data on a CD. About 100 minutes is the most you can practically do while maintaining compatibility with the majority of players, I believe.
This scheme puts at least 3 copies of the music on the disc. One in their own (probably highly compressed) DRM-laden format, one in standard CDDA format and one in MPEG format for the VCD copy.
Now, problem is, both the CDDA format and the VCD format are very strict about the data rate you record at -- in fact, both of them mandate 176400 bits per second. Therefore, even assuming the DRM format takes up no space on the disc whatsoever, the most you're going to get on a CD in this format is 50 minutes, unless it's violating one of the two above-mentioned standards, probably VCD (as it is a compressed format designed for storing video and audio, and they don't need to store any video). But, it ain't going to work on a lot of DVD players if that's what they've done.
Why is this modded as redundant? I don't see any other posts saying the same thing, and it is an interesting point.
And I have to say, I have the same experience. I run Win2K with mozilla as my browser and e-mail client and have _never_ had trouble. And that's not through lack of checking for it, or for lack of doing things that are typically seen as "risky" activities.
Note that a few months back there was a worm going around that hacked IIS web servers and dropped a spyware installation crack into all the HTML files on the server. There are probably plenty of legit sites that unknowingly install spyware on IE users' computers these days.
If you have a copy of an NT based OS, you can use captive to get read/write access to your NTFS filesystems.
My 128K Spectrum had fins. That was so cool... well... hot, if you rested your hand on it after it had been switched on for a while. :)