Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. [...] And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia".
I did. Half of the results I got were of the "study finds no link between power lines, leukemia" type. The rest seemed to be written by internet nuts with no clue what they were talking about. Assuming then you meant to search without the quotes, I repeated the search. This time I found more that substantiate what you said, but realising that half of them didn't know what they were talking about I repeated it on google scholar (as should anyone interested in what actual scientific research on a subject says).
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Even if they only imply that they are, it is still fraud. See this article that explains how courts will go about interpreting their claims: i.e., they will take the side most favourable to the purchaser if there's any ambiguity in the seller's description.
"100% Authentic" is a classic example of a common advertising dodge. It's not a sentence, it's a meaningless fragment without an object, subject, or a verb. The implication is that you're saying that the object right there on the same page is 100% authentic, but they're not responsible for your misunderstanding.
Yes, they are. Misrepresentation law is quite clear on matters like this: if a phrase is ambiguous, it is interpreted as what the purchaser is most likely to interpret it as. The rule is called contra proferentem.
Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to [...] cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
I'd say I was substantially emotionally distressed when I clicked on a goatse link. The link was a communication using electronic means. I'd categorise posting such a link as "severe". It is quite clearly a "hostile" act. Most people who post them, I suspect, do so repeatedly.
So what if this was written on a 16-bit hardware computer. I know of graphic games written in the Apple ][ Sweet-16 interpreter (a 16-bit machine in software installed on all Apple ][ machines) long before this.
No, you don't, as this game was written before the Apple II was designed. Hell, it was written before the processor that the Apple II was based on was designed.
And, this machine was a one-of-a-kind creation that had no meaningful volume, even by the standards of the time.
Most machines of the time had no meaningful volume. This machine was entirely typical of home computers in the pre-Altair era.
There were other games written on PDP-11 and LSI-11 machines (also true 16-bit hardware) that predate this.
But not home machines, not built using microprocessors, so a different class of game.
Yes, and the article is very cautious to do so. Still, we know that this game is the first for the hardware it ran on (as it was designed by a relative of the hardware's designer), and there are good reasons to think the hardware was the first home 16-bit system (it was produced using the first 16-bit microprocessor, less than a year after that microprocessor first made it to market).
A) wrote the first 8-bit PC game? B) Wrote the first 32-bit PC game? and C) Wrote the first 64-bit PC game? Ok...now how about the first C64 game? What about the first PC game? What about the first Apple II game? I could probably think of a million "firsts."
First 8-bit PC game and first Apple II game are probably the same: Steve Wozniak's reimplementation of Breakout in Integer BASIC.
I'm not knocking their products, but until they get their stuff Common Criteria, FIPS, and ICSA certified, not many large companies will be darkening their door.
Can I ask... which products do you think need certification, under which standards?
Spring Framework isn't a free-standing application, so I don't see how it _could_ be certified under either Common Criteria or ICSA's certification procedure. For example, CC certification is primarily aimed at isolating the "security functional requirements" of the software and ensuring that they are maintained. It's hard to see how a generic framework that can be used during the implementation of almost any conceivable system has any security functional requirements. It's also hard to see how to ensure they are maintained, as Spring doesn't provide public-facing code but instead utilities to be used by the user-provided public-facing code, which would necessarily be present for any testing. If it implemented any FIPS standards they could presumably be certified, but I believe to the extent it uses such standards it relies on underlying Java and/or application server implementations of them. Hyperic isn't a public-facing application, so I don't see the relevance of security certification... it shouldn't be a security critical application in any case.
What I haven't been able to make out of either of the company's website's, is whether they offer 'only' a servlet engine like Tomcat, or a full J2EE Application Server ? It seems to me like they would need at least a full J2EE Application Server like Geronimo to make any sort of threat ?
Neither. SpringSource's main product is Spring Framework, which is a library designed to assist with Java enterprise programming and coexists with either a servlet engine or an app server (but is designed to reduce the need for a full app server in cases that are borderline to needing one). Hyperic's product is a server monitoring framework which, like Spring, can work equally well with either. Neither produces an actual server, whether for servlets or an application server.
This might seem "niche" until you realize that no one makes money selling solutions to websites that don't have any traffic.
Not true in the slightest. For every site that needs 20 boxes, there are probably 2,000 that work just fine on a single box. The market in small site applications is _much_ larger than the market for big, resource intensive sites.
I have a java project, which basically exposes web-services (jax-ws) and it's built on java 1.5+ standard. I considered Spring when I was starting the project a couple years ago. However, I thought that they didn't offer much (for me) with regards to web services and I thought that the point of Spring was to get away from EJBs, which as of java 1.5 are vastly simpler and lighter weight.
So, I've basically been under the impression that Spring would die either as java dies, or as java integrates much of its functionality. What do they bring to the table? I'd honestly like to know.
A question for you: are you doing automated unit (isolated, rather than end-to-end) testing of your project? Spring's main advantage (for me, at least) is that helps me minimize the dependencies between my components by handling the dirty work of plugging them all together in the real application so that I can use easily mocked interfaces between them rather than directly-coded hard dependencies. This makes unit testing much easier. If you're not doing this kind of testing, I'd imagine Spring isn't for you. Of course, as an ever-increasing proportion of developers are doing it, Spring is becoming more relevant.
So, clearly, having decided that this wasn't a story you were interested in, you ignored it, didn't read any further, and didn't post in the comments thread.
Or at least, that's what most of the rest of us would have done. Why do you feel the need to complain when/. posts a story on a topic you don't care about?
Cool, thanks for filling me in. That was an honest question. Do you really think this merger is a "clear and present danger" to Microsoft and IBM (another honest question, o cynics of/.)?
No. Spring Framework is a clear and present danger to Sun's J2EE standards, because it provides a lot of the same benefits (particularly if combined with a good ORM librar -- e.g. Hibernate, which it integrates with particularly well) with substantially lower overhead. To the extent that IBM's business model is based on J2EE (which is only slightly) Spring is a threat, but IBM have a finger in almost all Java pies; if Spring developers prefer Tomcat to a heavy application server like Websphere, IBM still provides just about everything else, from some of the best hardware to run it on down to the most popular IDE to build it with, which is also designed to integrate nicely with Spring's framework. They also provide top quality training and support for all of these facilities. For those developers who would otherwise stick with websphere, Hyperic might provide a little encouragement to switch to a lighter platform, but mainly I suspect it's just good news for those of us who've always been living without websphere's management features.
Nothing SpringSource does is in direct competition with any of Microsoft's products in this line. Spring have a.NET port of their framework, which adds to rather than competes with MS's products. MS don't have a product that competes with Hyperic, as far as I can see, so this merger changes nothing with regards to MS's position.
How about tokenizing commonly used words and sending that, ne byte per word ?
Won't work because there are too many commonly used words in most natural languages. You'd be better off coming up with some system for compressing common consonant/vowel combinations into a single character, but even then you'd probably not do an awful lot better on average than the 6 bits per character that SMS works with.
If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty?
Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything. A clever encoding scheme might squeeze as many as 80 in. OTOH, each of those characters carries more information than a single character of English text. Not sure about Japanese, but most common Chinese words are only two characters long, so being able to include fewer characters shouldn't be a real issue.
The boot sector of an Apple II disk was 256 bytes, insufficient for both fulfilling the normal task of a boot sector and also containing a functional computer virus.
Disagree. Apple IIs were based on the 6502, which had an extraordinarily compact instruction code compared to modern machines. I've never tried writing an Apple II boot sector, but based on my experience of writing PC boot sectors, 256 bytes is more space than you would need. In a single 512-byte 80x86 boot sector I've managed to fit a read-only FAT filesystem driver, code to check that the system is a 386 or higher, chain loader, and user friendly error messages for various causes of boot failures. I see no trouble fitting a chain loader and (simple) virus into a 256-byte 6502 boot sector.
(I'm sure those with greater knowledge of Latin could weigh in on other reasons why 'virii' is incorrect, this is just the one I've been made aware of)
Like, for instance, the fact that "virii" would be the plural form of "virius", not "virus"... that's the elephant in the room, I think.
Somebody decided not to run new wiring in the college library and instead put all the computers on wireless, and don't know if it's the implementation or something but the computers are beyond slow (about dial up speeds in some cases).
This is the problem with wireless. People do small pilot schemes, see they perform reasonably well, then install 500+ machines on the network. 500 machines all sharing the same 54Mb/s (half duplex) only reliably get 108Kb/s each (i.e. approximately dial-up speeds).
You are still going to need ethernet to connect all the wireless access points together.
Well, sure, but if that's all you're doing with it, you're unlikely to be bothered if the cost of a 16-port switch is suddenly in the $5,000 dollar range, 'cause you aren't going to need many of them.
As far as I know, people run 32-bit JVMs even on 64-bit OSes.
Depends. For memory intensive stuff (e.g. application servers) most people are on 64-bit VMs these days. For desktop use, 32-bit is the most common.
But, even if the JVM was 64-bit, it's the same amount of data either way -- one word.:-)
Except, even in a 64-bit VM, an int is only 32 bits. While the stack will presumably be padded to 64-bit alignment, the VM should be passing two ints in each 64 bit word (assuming there are enough available).
It amazes me how when firefox has a new version, everyone downloads it with a warm and fuzzy feeling that it is going to be an improvement. However, whenever IE has a new version, people are so reluctant to download it that MS now has to force the public to upgrade.
The difference is in the customers, not the software. People who are comfortable upgrading software typically upgrade whenever they get the chance... and have, as a rule, upgraded IE to firefox (or opera or safari or whatever). Only people who are nervous/ambivalent about upgrading stick with IE unless they have a good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. [...] And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia" .
I did. Half of the results I got were of the "study finds no link between power lines, leukemia" type. The rest seemed to be written by internet nuts with no clue what they were talking about. Assuming then you meant to search without the quotes, I repeated the search. This time I found more that substantiate what you said, but realising that half of them didn't know what they were talking about I repeated it on google scholar (as should anyone interested in what actual scientific research on a subject says).
Results: "no relationship was found between leukemia and electric power line configurations", "Residence near high-voltage lines did not increase risk", [test subjects who lived] within 300 metres [of a power line showed a] relative risk [with] 95% confidence interval [of one kind of leukemia of] 0.8-3.5 [, or for another] 0.7-3.8 [, or if exposure was prolonged] 1.0-4.6 [or] 0.9-4.7" (i.e., for those who don't understand how to interpret that last one, no statistically significant effects -- note that this is the study that's usually cited _in favour_ of arguments about power lines causing leukemia). "the risk was not significantly associated with either residential magnetic-field levels ", "The study provides [...] no support for an association between leukemia and [magnetic field exposure]", "the results suggest that typical magnetic fields of high-voltage power lines are not an important cause of leukemia in adults", "These results provide little support for a relation between power-frequency EMF exposure and risk of childhood leukemia", "For residential exposure >= 0.2 uT, the relative risk for leukemia was estimated at .. 95% confidence interval 0.8-2.2" (i.e. not statistically significant). That's the first page of results finished with; I don't see any evidence fdor your assertion of a 70% increase in risk, and I would be cautious at claiming even that there's a link. Google scholar selects widely cited papers first, and papers with the most provocative results are likely to be the most widely cited. Given the number of studies that have been conducted on this subject, we'd expect at least some to come up with postive results based on random variation. That none of the ones I've looked at have even had statistically significant results suggests there's nothing to this, and it really is just random variation we're seeing.
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Even if they only imply that they are, it is still fraud. See this article that explains how courts will go about interpreting their claims: i.e., they will take the side most favourable to the purchaser if there's any ambiguity in the seller's description.
"100% Authentic" is a classic example of a common advertising dodge. It's not a sentence, it's a meaningless fragment without an object, subject, or a verb. The implication is that you're saying that the object right there on the same page is 100% authentic, but they're not responsible for your misunderstanding.
Yes, they are. Misrepresentation law is quite clear on matters like this: if a phrase is ambiguous, it is interpreted as what the purchaser is most likely to interpret it as. The rule is called contra proferentem.
Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to [...] cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
I'd say I was substantially emotionally distressed when I clicked on a goatse link. The link was a communication using electronic means. I'd categorise posting such a link as "severe". It is quite clearly a "hostile" act. Most people who post them, I suspect, do so repeatedly.
This law would make trolling a criminal offence.
So what if this was written on a 16-bit hardware computer. I know of graphic games written in the Apple ][ Sweet-16 interpreter (a 16-bit machine in software installed on all Apple ][ machines) long before this.
No, you don't, as this game was written before the Apple II was designed. Hell, it was written before the processor that the Apple II was based on was designed.
And, this machine was a one-of-a-kind creation that had no meaningful volume, even by the standards of the time.
Most machines of the time had no meaningful volume. This machine was entirely typical of home computers in the pre-Altair era.
There were other games written on PDP-11 and LSI-11 machines (also true 16-bit hardware) that predate this.
But not home machines, not built using microprocessors, so a different class of game.
Yes, and the article is very cautious to do so. Still, we know that this game is the first for the hardware it ran on (as it was designed by a relative of the hardware's designer), and there are good reasons to think the hardware was the first home 16-bit system (it was produced using the first 16-bit microprocessor, less than a year after that microprocessor first made it to market).
A) wrote the first 8-bit PC game? B) Wrote the first 32-bit PC game? and C) Wrote the first 64-bit PC game? Ok...now how about the first C64 game? What about the first PC game? What about the first Apple II game? I could probably think of a million "firsts."
First 8-bit PC game and first Apple II game are probably the same: Steve Wozniak's reimplementation of Breakout in Integer BASIC.
I'm not knocking their products, but until they get their stuff Common Criteria, FIPS, and ICSA certified, not many large companies will be darkening their door.
Can I ask... which products do you think need certification, under which standards?
Spring Framework isn't a free-standing application, so I don't see how it _could_ be certified under either Common Criteria or ICSA's certification procedure. For example, CC certification is primarily aimed at isolating the "security functional requirements" of the software and ensuring that they are maintained. It's hard to see how a generic framework that can be used during the implementation of almost any conceivable system has any security functional requirements. It's also hard to see how to ensure they are maintained, as Spring doesn't provide public-facing code but instead utilities to be used by the user-provided public-facing code, which would necessarily be present for any testing. If it implemented any FIPS standards they could presumably be certified, but I believe to the extent it uses such standards it relies on underlying Java and/or application server implementations of them. Hyperic isn't a public-facing application, so I don't see the relevance of security certification... it shouldn't be a security critical application in any case.
What I haven't been able to make out of either of the company's website's, is whether they offer 'only' a servlet engine like Tomcat, or a full J2EE Application Server ? It seems to me like they would need at least a full J2EE Application Server like Geronimo to make any sort of threat ?
Neither. SpringSource's main product is Spring Framework, which is a library designed to assist with Java enterprise programming and coexists with either a servlet engine or an app server (but is designed to reduce the need for a full app server in cases that are borderline to needing one). Hyperic's product is a server monitoring framework which, like Spring, can work equally well with either. Neither produces an actual server, whether for servlets or an application server.
This might seem "niche" until you realize that no one makes money selling solutions to websites that don't have any traffic.
Not true in the slightest. For every site that needs 20 boxes, there are probably 2,000 that work just fine on a single box. The market in small site applications is _much_ larger than the market for big, resource intensive sites.
I have a java project, which basically exposes web-services (jax-ws) and it's built on java 1.5+ standard. I considered Spring when I was starting the project a couple years ago. However, I thought that they didn't offer much (for me) with regards to web services and I thought that the point of Spring was to get away from EJBs, which as of java 1.5 are vastly simpler and lighter weight.
So, I've basically been under the impression that Spring would die either as java dies, or as java integrates much of its functionality. What do they bring to the table? I'd honestly like to know.
A question for you: are you doing automated unit (isolated, rather than end-to-end) testing of your project? Spring's main advantage (for me, at least) is that helps me minimize the dependencies between my components by handling the dirty work of plugging them all together in the real application so that I can use easily mocked interfaces between them rather than directly-coded hard dependencies. This makes unit testing much easier. If you're not doing this kind of testing, I'd imagine Spring isn't for you. Of course, as an ever-increasing proportion of developers are doing it, Spring is becoming more relevant.
Looked interesting till I read 'Java'.
So, clearly, having decided that this wasn't a story you were interested in, you ignored it, didn't read any further, and didn't post in the comments thread.
Or at least, that's what most of the rest of us would have done. Why do you feel the need to complain when /. posts a story on a topic you don't care about?
Cool, thanks for filling me in. That was an honest question. Do you really think this merger is a "clear and present danger" to Microsoft and IBM (another honest question, o cynics of /.)?
No. Spring Framework is a clear and present danger to Sun's J2EE standards, because it provides a lot of the same benefits (particularly if combined with a good ORM librar -- e.g. Hibernate, which it integrates with particularly well) with substantially lower overhead. To the extent that IBM's business model is based on J2EE (which is only slightly) Spring is a threat, but IBM have a finger in almost all Java pies; if Spring developers prefer Tomcat to a heavy application server like Websphere, IBM still provides just about everything else, from some of the best hardware to run it on down to the most popular IDE to build it with, which is also designed to integrate nicely with Spring's framework. They also provide top quality training and support for all of these facilities. For those developers who would otherwise stick with websphere, Hyperic might provide a little encouragement to switch to a lighter platform, but mainly I suspect it's just good news for those of us who've always been living without websphere's management features.
Nothing SpringSource does is in direct competition with any of Microsoft's products in this line. Spring have a .NET port of their framework, which adds to rather than competes with MS's products. MS don't have a product that competes with Hyperic, as far as I can see, so this merger changes nothing with regards to MS's position.
joke about why the standard railway gauge is 4'8.5" -- going back to the width of ancient roman roads.
Joke? This is actually true. Both standard gauge railway and roman roads were designed to be the width of a pair of horses.
How about tokenizing commonly used words and sending that, ne byte per word ?
Won't work because there are too many commonly used words in most natural languages. You'd be better off coming up with some system for compressing common consonant/vowel combinations into a single character, but even then you'd probably not do an awful lot better on average than the 6 bits per character that SMS works with.
If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty?
Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything. A clever encoding scheme might squeeze as many as 80 in. OTOH, each of those characters carries more information than a single character of English text. Not sure about Japanese, but most common Chinese words are only two characters long, so being able to include fewer characters shouldn't be a real issue.
The boot sector of an Apple II disk was 256 bytes, insufficient for both fulfilling the normal task of a boot sector and also containing a functional computer virus.
Disagree. Apple IIs were based on the 6502, which had an extraordinarily compact instruction code compared to modern machines. I've never tried writing an Apple II boot sector, but based on my experience of writing PC boot sectors, 256 bytes is more space than you would need. In a single 512-byte 80x86 boot sector I've managed to fit a read-only FAT filesystem driver, code to check that the system is a 386 or higher, chain loader, and user friendly error messages for various causes of boot failures. I see no trouble fitting a chain loader and (simple) virus into a 256-byte 6502 boot sector.
2) Good Times Virus
Well ok not a virus, but I remember having to explain to my dad what a Virus hoax was for hours...ugggh...
I actually received a copy of Good Times only last year. Yes, it's still doing the rounds.
(I'm sure those with greater knowledge of Latin could weigh in on other reasons why 'virii' is incorrect, this is just the one I've been made aware of)
Like, for instance, the fact that "virii" would be the plural form of "virius", not "virus"... that's the elephant in the room, I think.
Somebody decided not to run new wiring in the college library and instead put all the computers on wireless, and don't know if it's the implementation or something but the computers are beyond slow (about dial up speeds in some cases).
This is the problem with wireless. People do small pilot schemes, see they perform reasonably well, then install 500+ machines on the network. 500 machines all sharing the same 54Mb/s (half duplex) only reliably get 108Kb/s each (i.e. approximately dial-up speeds).
You are still going to need ethernet to connect all the wireless access points together.
Well, sure, but if that's all you're doing with it, you're unlikely to be bothered if the cost of a 16-port switch is suddenly in the $5,000 dollar range, 'cause you aren't going to need many of them.
A request for an ad served up on a page does not include information about the search terms that were used to reach the parent page.
Most ads are served up via javascript these days. Javascript can easily grab search terms via document.referer.
As far as I know, people run 32-bit JVMs even on 64-bit OSes.
Depends. For memory intensive stuff (e.g. application servers) most people are on 64-bit VMs these days. For desktop use, 32-bit is the most common.
But, even if the JVM was 64-bit, it's the same amount of data either way -- one word. :-)
Except, even in a 64-bit VM, an int is only 32 bits. While the stack will presumably be padded to 64-bit alignment, the VM should be passing two ints in each 64 bit word (assuming there are enough available).
I have installed Visual Studio 2008 twice in the past week - zero reboots needed each time, and the only file associations it monkeyed with was .cs.
They must have improved it somewhat recently, in that case. When I installed VS2005 Pro a couple of weeks back after an XP reinstall, it took without asking (highlighting indicating file types that were previously associated with a different application on my system): addin, asa, asax, ascx, ashx, asm, asmx, aspx, bsc, c, cpp, cs, css, cur, cxx, datasource, disco, dmp, dsp, dsw, dtd, h, hpp, hxx, i, ico, idb, idl, ilk, inc, lic, lst, mak, master, mdmp, mdp, mk, ncb, odh, odl, pal, pch, rc, rc2, rct, rdlc, res, resx, rgs, s, sbr, sdl, settings, sitemap, skin, sln, snippet, snk, srf, suo, tlh, tli, user, vb, vbproj, vcp, vcproj, vcw, vdp, vdproj, vscontent, vsi, vsmacros, vsmproj, vspolicy, vspolicycache, vspolicydef, vsprops, vspscc, vsscc, vssettings, vssscc, vstemplate, vsz, wsdl, wsf, xdr, xsc, xsd, xsl, xslt, and xss.
It also added itself to the "open with" list but didn't change the default for: asp, bmp, hta, htm, html, js, txt, vbs, xml.
It amazes me how when firefox has a new version, everyone downloads it with a warm and fuzzy feeling that it is going to be an improvement. However, whenever IE has a new version, people are so reluctant to download it that MS now has to force the public to upgrade.
The difference is in the customers, not the software. People who are comfortable upgrading software typically upgrade whenever they get the chance... and have, as a rule, upgraded IE to firefox (or opera or safari or whatever). Only people who are nervous/ambivalent about upgrading stick with IE unless they have a good reason.