I considered that, but I don't think I'd mess around with mixing drinks if I had just spent 16 hours straight troubleshooting intermittent problems with roaming profiles. So I thought it was unlikely.
I'd probably just go for something strong and undiluted. (If it weren't for the fact that I don't drink alcohol.)
Just out of curiosity, was this one of those hasty replies and you realized after the fact, or were you testing the mods who seem to all be from marketing this weekend? Either way, been there myself. Regards.
I believe you answered your own question there cap'n. Welcome aboard the USSFn Troll.
If you knew or suspected I was trolling, why did you bite?
Of course, you're a troll yourself, but I just felt I had to respond to a detail in your post. "Welcome aboard the USSFn Troll." More specifically "USSFn".
Due to your unintentional bright shining ray of inspirons (inspirational particles), I just found a nice way to refer to the Fn key on laptop keyboards. Call it the "Friggin key". That's nice and pronouncable isn't it.
Thank you for boosing my incredibly jocular complexion today.
(Ftw: All spelling mistakes in this post are intenational.)
So what does this article say really? Apple's Intel based laptops "may" come out in April-May next year? Yawn.
It's not even a wild-ass guess that may become true, nor rampant speculation on something unlikely and unannounced. We all know Intel Powerbooks are coming, just not precisely when. This is just another educated guess within that timeframe.
Wake me when they have something substantive. Though by the time they have anything substantive, it'll be just a few days before the release or at the release anyway.
GMT is simply the mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory.
UTC is measured using atomic clocks, based on TAI (International Atomic Time) which is a weighted average of a few hundred atomic clocks around the world. Now, to keep it within one second of mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory, they occasionally add in a leap second here and there to make it work. The result being that UTC is offset an integral number of seconds from TAI.
The particular dispute with the French that I've heard of is that the French wanted to call UTC TUC (for Temps Universel Coordonné, or something like that) while others wanted to call it CUT (Coordinated Universal Time). So to ensure nobody got what they wanted, they agreed to call it UTC out of spite for one another.
Now, there may be another conflict with the French (the French are always making a fuss about something:-) ) that I haven't heard about, but I doubt the conflict the grandparent mentioned had anything to do with the GMT->UTC transition.
Interesting, however, how the Proud French People values communications and interoperability with the Benelux, Germany and Italy more than being in a time zone corresponding to solar time at their latitude. They'd be a much closer match having the same time as the UK, Paris being just at about 2 E. Then again, the only thing the French like more than to be different than anyone else is to spite the English.:-)
Ok, I'm replying to myself, since I can't really single out any of the followups to my post earlier.
Of course, I don't have much to compare to, coming from vi, make, and gcc on Linux. I haven't ever coded anything on Windows, so I couldn't compare against that, but I assumed from the grandparent that Visual Studio didn't have this feature. Oh well, good for Visual Studio.:-)
(Then again, I never said Visual Studio didn't have that feature, nor that Xcode was the only IDE with this feature.)
I still thought Fix and Continue was pretty slick when I started learning to code on Mac OS X. (Of course, I knew of similar functionality back on the ooold days when I still "coded" in QBASIC.EXE, but that was for an interpreted language.)
Just goes to show how much gdb, make and vi sucks compared to a proper IDE, no? (At least in this respect.):-)
No true geek would use anything but UTC, wherever you are.
No.
A true geek would know all the different ways employed to measure time, included, but not limited to, the various different variations of Universal Time, Atomic Time, Solar Time, Sidereal Time, Ephermis Time and Terrestrial Time, not to mention time according to the day/night cycle of an extra-terrestrial body. He would also be able to tell you in minute detail the differences between GMT and UTC.
Time zones are easy, they're all just simple offsets from UTC.
Me, I just fall asleep when I'm tired, and wake up when I do, and try to be awake when it matters.
As opposed to the instantaneous communication you get over fiber and copper?;-)
From memory, I seem to remember that propagation times for copper is about 2/3 the speed of light. (Meaning you get 50% more latency for the same distance.) So, for the same distance, wireless actually gets less latency due to physical propagation times than copper.
In fiberoptic cables, the propagation time is the speed of light (maybe slightly slower since it's passing through the fiberoptic medium, I don't know). But since cables usually aren't perfectly straight between transmitter and receiver, you'll get a longer distance with a fiberoptic cable than with a wireless link.
So at the end of the day, wireless is actually the best form of communication out there if you focus solely on latency due to the physical limitation on the speed of light.
(This is of course, ignoring the much larger delays involved in signal processing.)
So naming stuff after characters of contemporary stories is bad, but naming stuff after characters of ancient stories is okay?... Right. Double standards.:-P
While it's true that any monoculture is a bad situation, a monoculture of Firefox would be much less bad than a monoculture of IE.
Now, it's very unlikely that such a monoculture would arise. But since we're talking hypothetics here, bear with me for a few paragraphs.
First of all, the Firefox rendering engine, unlike Internet Explorer, is cross-platform, which means that it's not restricted just to Windows users. The Mac version of IE used a different rendering engine from the Windows one, for example. So it's a monoculture, but not one that shuts out people using different operating systems.
Second, it's open. Bugs can be fixed quickly from identification, much quicker than the closed processes of many proprietary software developers. (I don't want to single Microsoft out here, take a look at the security records of many other closed software hourses.)
Third, it can be forked, if the "original Firefox developers" stagnate, since it's open source. There's no real vendor lock-in here, because you don't have to build the software from the ground again. Look what happened to XFree86. It was the de facto standard for X servers on Linux, and probably very popular on other platforms as well for god knows how many years. Now who still uses it and hasn't switched over to X.org? Since it'll be a fork of the original software, people will be less reluctant to switch, since there will be incremental changes, rather than a complete sidegrade which would break all kinds of stuff and require retraining. Also, the psychological factors of Firefox not being a part of the system shell on Windows, not to mention not having a generic name like "Internet Explorer" makes it easier to dislodge in people's minds.
Finally, I don't think the situation of a Firefox monoculture is very likely. Microsoft is not going to abandon their Internet Explorer any time soon, and I don't see Firefox evaporating in the near future either. It's gained a pretty firm foothold in the browser market. What I see as having happened, and what will probably be the status quo in the near future, is the emergence of Microsoft IE and Firefox as the two real main competitors, the two great "giants in the playground" if you will. Firefox may gain some market share, and IE will fight back, but that doesn't really matter. As ironic and as contradictory as it may sound, the emergence of a single alternative browser as the main competitor to IE as a direct benifit in the battle against browser monoculture. The fact that there is one "alpha alternative browser" rather than a disorganised infighting mass of small alternative browsers gives the entire alternative browser movement a lot more credit. How do you design your web pages to cater to IE plus an amorphous blob of alternative browsers? You don't, so you just ignore anything that's not IE. By giving webmasters two distinct targets to focus on, you're forcing them to make pages that aren't IE-specific, and most of the time, that means the pages will work great in other web browsers too, which is the real and major win we want to accomplish.
I reap the fruits of this ongoing battle for browser supremacy every day. I use OmniWeb for my daily web browsing, which in my opinion is the best web browser out there for any operating system. It uses a fork of Safari's WebCore (or whatever it's called) to drive its rendering, which all in all, is a comparatively small player in the browser market. On the vast overwhelming majority of sites, it Just Works. Not because they were designed for OmniWeb or Safari, but because web developers design less and less specifically for IE.
Hm, interesting that. Skype uses encryption that (supposedly) makes it impossible (or at least very hard) to listen in on Skype calls. Maybe that's why China wants to block it?
Although, this would be no reason for them to block standard SIP, which typically is unencrypted. Although SIP is a generic enough solution to support encryption at some layer, most existing VoIP solutions don't do this. I know that my IP telephony at home doesn't use any encryption, but I'm not that concerned about it, since neither would a standard POTS line if I were to have one of those.
But then again, when you're not raking in $x/minute for phone calls, but instead routing IP traffic at your own expense, your budget for sniffing IP telephone traffic gets that much smaller. Why invest in new technology to eavesdrop on VoIP calls when you can just maintain the status quo by adding some new rules to the Great Firewall of China?
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I considered that, but I don't think I'd mess around with mixing drinks if I had just spent 16 hours straight troubleshooting intermittent problems with roaming profiles. So I thought it was unlikely.
I'd probably just go for something strong and undiluted. (If it weren't for the fact that I don't drink alcohol.)
Open sshd to permit access from the outside world, as well as root logins. Then post your root password and your IP address in a reply to this thread.
That is bound to screw *something* up sooner or later.
Either I'm missing out on understanding some incredibly funny (or unfunny) joke, or you linked to the wrong book.
All of the above.
I'm as surprised as you are.
If you knew or suspected I was trolling, why did you bite?
Of course, you're a troll yourself, but I just felt I had to respond to a detail in your post. "Welcome aboard the USSFn Troll." More specifically "USSFn".
Due to your unintentional bright shining ray of inspirons (inspirational particles), I just found a nice way to refer to the Fn key on laptop keyboards. Call it the "Friggin key". That's nice and pronouncable isn't it.
Thank you for boosing my incredibly jocular complexion today.
(Ftw: All spelling mistakes in this post are intenational.)
Drat, you meddling cad! You uncovered my dastardly plot you did. ;-)
Insightful?! Wtf! How about bleeding-frigging-obvious. Don't waste your mod points on this crap I wrote.
No shit, Spotlight.
So what does this article say really? Apple's Intel based laptops "may" come out in April-May next year? Yawn.
It's not even a wild-ass guess that may become true, nor rampant speculation on something unlikely and unannounced. We all know Intel Powerbooks are coming, just not precisely when. This is just another educated guess within that timeframe.
Wake me when they have something substantive. Though by the time they have anything substantive, it'll be just a few days before the release or at the release anyway.
So wear gloves!
The parent is simply wrong.
:-) ) that I haven't heard about, but I doubt the conflict the grandparent mentioned had anything to do with the GMT->UTC transition.
:-)
GMT and UTC are two very different time scales.
GMT is simply the mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory.
UTC is measured using atomic clocks, based on TAI (International Atomic Time) which is a weighted average of a few hundred atomic clocks around the world. Now, to keep it within one second of mean solar time at Greenwich Observatory, they occasionally add in a leap second here and there to make it work. The result being that UTC is offset an integral number of seconds from TAI.
The particular dispute with the French that I've heard of is that the French wanted to call UTC TUC (for Temps Universel Coordonné, or something like that) while others wanted to call it CUT (Coordinated Universal Time). So to ensure nobody got what they wanted, they agreed to call it UTC out of spite for one another.
Now, there may be another conflict with the French (the French are always making a fuss about something
Interesting, however, how the Proud French People values communications and interoperability with the Benelux, Germany and Italy more than being in a time zone corresponding to solar time at their latitude. They'd be a much closer match having the same time as the UK, Paris being just at about 2 E. Then again, the only thing the French like more than to be different than anyone else is to spite the English.
Ok, I'm replying to myself, since I can't really single out any of the followups to my post earlier.
:-)
:-)
Of course, I don't have much to compare to, coming from vi, make, and gcc on Linux. I haven't ever coded anything on Windows, so I couldn't compare against that, but I assumed from the grandparent that Visual Studio didn't have this feature. Oh well, good for Visual Studio.
(Then again, I never said Visual Studio didn't have that feature, nor that Xcode was the only IDE with this feature.)
I still thought Fix and Continue was pretty slick when I started learning to code on Mac OS X. (Of course, I knew of similar functionality back on the ooold days when I still "coded" in QBASIC.EXE, but that was for an interpreted language.)
Just goes to show how much gdb, make and vi sucks compared to a proper IDE, no? (At least in this respect.)
No true geek would use anything but UTC, wherever you are.
No.
A true geek would know all the different ways employed to measure time, included, but not limited to, the various different variations of Universal Time, Atomic Time, Solar Time, Sidereal Time, Ephermis Time and Terrestrial Time, not to mention time according to the day/night cycle of an extra-terrestrial body. He would also be able to tell you in minute detail the differences between GMT and UTC.
Time zones are easy, they're all just simple offsets from UTC.
Me, I just fall asleep when I'm tired, and wake up when I do, and try to be awake when it matters.
... you mean where you modify code at runtime while running it inside a debugger?
:-)
Get on Mac OS X, and start coding using Xcode. You may drool once you find the Fix & Continue (ZeroLink) feature.
As opposed to the instantaneous communication you get over fiber and copper? ;-)
From memory, I seem to remember that propagation times for copper is about 2/3 the speed of light. (Meaning you get 50% more latency for the same distance.) So, for the same distance, wireless actually gets less latency due to physical propagation times than copper.
In fiberoptic cables, the propagation time is the speed of light (maybe slightly slower since it's passing through the fiberoptic medium, I don't know). But since cables usually aren't perfectly straight between transmitter and receiver, you'll get a longer distance with a fiberoptic cable than with a wireless link.
So at the end of the day, wireless is actually the best form of communication out there if you focus solely on latency due to the physical limitation on the speed of light.
(This is of course, ignoring the much larger delays involved in signal processing.)
Sounds like an sophisticated version of RONJA. (Though of course, the system you describe is much more sophisticated.)
Which doesn't really matter since all Japanese live in tiny apartments. :-D
(Insert unfunny observation about correlation about size of a certain part of the body here.)
Not trivial. But definitely possible.
So naming stuff after characters of contemporary stories is bad, but naming stuff after characters of ancient stories is okay? ... Right. Double standards. :-P
You just described, in part, what OpenBSD does. They have a group that audits all software that comes with OpenBSD and tries to find flaws.
Though I don't think OpenBSD comes with any software such as Firefox. (And that's not audited because it's not part of the default install.)
While it's true that any monoculture is a bad situation, a monoculture of Firefox would be much less bad than a monoculture of IE.
Now, it's very unlikely that such a monoculture would arise. But since we're talking hypothetics here, bear with me for a few paragraphs.
First of all, the Firefox rendering engine, unlike Internet Explorer, is cross-platform, which means that it's not restricted just to Windows users. The Mac version of IE used a different rendering engine from the Windows one, for example. So it's a monoculture, but not one that shuts out people using different operating systems.
Second, it's open. Bugs can be fixed quickly from identification, much quicker than the closed processes of many proprietary software developers. (I don't want to single Microsoft out here, take a look at the security records of many other closed software hourses.)
Third, it can be forked, if the "original Firefox developers" stagnate, since it's open source. There's no real vendor lock-in here, because you don't have to build the software from the ground again. Look what happened to XFree86. It was the de facto standard for X servers on Linux, and probably very popular on other platforms as well for god knows how many years. Now who still uses it and hasn't switched over to X.org? Since it'll be a fork of the original software, people will be less reluctant to switch, since there will be incremental changes, rather than a complete sidegrade which would break all kinds of stuff and require retraining. Also, the psychological factors of Firefox not being a part of the system shell on Windows, not to mention not having a generic name like "Internet Explorer" makes it easier to dislodge in people's minds.
Finally, I don't think the situation of a Firefox monoculture is very likely. Microsoft is not going to abandon their Internet Explorer any time soon, and I don't see Firefox evaporating in the near future either. It's gained a pretty firm foothold in the browser market. What I see as having happened, and what will probably be the status quo in the near future, is the emergence of Microsoft IE and Firefox as the two real main competitors, the two great "giants in the playground" if you will. Firefox may gain some market share, and IE will fight back, but that doesn't really matter. As ironic and as contradictory as it may sound, the emergence of a single alternative browser as the main competitor to IE as a direct benifit in the battle against browser monoculture. The fact that there is one "alpha alternative browser" rather than a disorganised infighting mass of small alternative browsers gives the entire alternative browser movement a lot more credit. How do you design your web pages to cater to IE plus an amorphous blob of alternative browsers? You don't, so you just ignore anything that's not IE. By giving webmasters two distinct targets to focus on, you're forcing them to make pages that aren't IE-specific, and most of the time, that means the pages will work great in other web browsers too, which is the real and major win we want to accomplish.
I reap the fruits of this ongoing battle for browser supremacy every day. I use OmniWeb for my daily web browsing, which in my opinion is the best web browser out there for any operating system. It uses a fork of Safari's WebCore (or whatever it's called) to drive its rendering, which all in all, is a comparatively small player in the browser market. On the vast overwhelming majority of sites, it Just Works. Not because they were designed for OmniWeb or Safari, but because web developers design less and less specifically for IE.
Let the browser wars rage on!
Hm. Apparently I can't spell in Polish (sex is seks in Polish, not sex), so I inadvertently seem to have posted redundantly.
This whole article reminded me of the classic polish cult movie, Sexmisia.
It's not quite the same script as you described, but very similar in some aspects.
Hm, interesting that. Skype uses encryption that (supposedly) makes it impossible (or at least very hard) to listen in on Skype calls. Maybe that's why China wants to block it?
Although, this would be no reason for them to block standard SIP, which typically is unencrypted. Although SIP is a generic enough solution to support encryption at some layer, most existing VoIP solutions don't do this. I know that my IP telephony at home doesn't use any encryption, but I'm not that concerned about it, since neither would a standard POTS line if I were to have one of those.
But then again, when you're not raking in $x/minute for phone calls, but instead routing IP traffic at your own expense, your budget for sniffing IP telephone traffic gets that much smaller. Why invest in new technology to eavesdrop on VoIP calls when you can just maintain the status quo by adding some new rules to the Great Firewall of China?